Forum Discussion

raymyrtle's avatar
raymyrtle
Explorer | Level 3
3 years ago

Link to external drive, then link to laptop broken on Dropbox backup plan

I'm on the Dropbox Backup plan allowing me unlimited backup of my laptop and 1 external hard drive.

The whole process has been bumpy to say the least, but the most recently problems have escalated:

 

The 'link' to my external hard drive was 'broken'. This means I suddenly lost the most secure copy of my files! Dropbox couldn't recover them so I had to reload the whole external drive. Then I had a new copy of my external drive and a broken one.

Now the link to my Mac was broken as well.

Unfortunately I don't know how to re-start that back up. Here is what my account looks like and when I try to upload files from my Mac

When I try to re-load my Mac the files are empty.

 

6 Replies

  • Nancy's avatar
    Nancy
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Hi raymyrtle, I’m sorry to hear about this. Let’s take a look.

     

    Can you clarify what happened the first time, when your external drive backup stopped working? Was the external drive suddenly disconnected for any reason, for example, while Dropbox was syncing?

     

    Besides that, and in regards to your computer backup, what happened right before it stopped working on your Mac device? 

     

    Did you click on the “Save” button showing on your second screenshot, and nothing was uploaded after that?

     

    Keep me in the loop.

  • raymyrtle's avatar
    raymyrtle
    Explorer | Level 3
    3 years ago

    Hello Nancy:

      I think the problem with my Mac's back up started when wanted to have drop box prioritize the back up of my external hard drive, and clicked a blue button that said something like 'stop backing up'.

  • Nancy's avatar
    Nancy
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Thanks for that, raymyrtle! What happens if you click on the “Save” button that’s showing in your second screenshot? I’d like to check if the Dropbox app starts backing up your computer files again, or if nothing at all happens.

  • raymyrtle's avatar
    raymyrtle
    Explorer | Level 3
    3 years ago

    Hi Nancy:

     Life's busy before Christmas, but I appreciate your helping me.

    I've tried to re-select my Mac for backup, Here are some screen shots:

     

     

  • raymyrtle's avatar
    raymyrtle
    Explorer | Level 3
    3 years ago
    Spoiler
    Opps I'm trying to upload the screenshots

     Hi Nancy: I hope these have landed safely!  Shows Mac (2) still disabled. 😞

    In spite of it apparently being accepted a few minutes earlier.

    Another strange thing, is that my account name seems to be an earlier one- so I have 780GB of 4GB 'capacity',  although I'm on an unlimited plan.?

    Is this why things aren't loading?

  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Thanks for the screenshots, raymyrtle.

     

    So, does the backup of your computer still appear as disabled in your backups page here?

     

    As for your capacity, while you might have unlimited space to backup your computer, your Dropbox space (the place outside the backup folders, which is for the rest of your Dropbox files) is not unlimited.

     

    What do you see about your usage here?

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