Forum Discussion

Kris_G's avatar
Kris_G
New member | Level 2
3 years ago

Searching in deleted files by name

How can I search in the deleted files. So far the only way I can look through them is scroll. And that can take a very long time :).  
Delete
File access
restore
Saldor's avatar
Saldor
Explorer | Level 3
2 years ago

I was facing the same situation. There was a specific file I knew I used to have, and now it was nowhere to be found. I learned that searching for deleted files through the Dropbox web interface was impossible. I didn't know when I deleted it or what folder it was in, so I couldn't use those attributes for filtering. I have deleted 10,000 files a month in the last 13 years, so scrolling through them was not an option.


What I did was ask ChatGPT to write a Python program for me to list all deleted files recursively in my Dropbox account. It took a couple of hours for the program to run, but now I have a 112 MB file with 1.5 million deleted files listed. And I did find my deleted file among those so that I could restore it.


So there is a way to find that lost file!

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