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Discusted's avatar
Discusted
New member | Level 2
1 day ago

Feedback on the Dropbox desktop app and backup feature

WARNING: DO NOT USE! DropBox **bleep**ed up my file system (MacOS) so bad that even my fellow Apple Developers, experts like you find at Stack Exchange, file system experts from the very best data recovery experts, … can’t help. Problem: it blew up mid-backup. what a mess. Marketing nerd answered my call to support - not even doing what they said to TRY. Root cause of this mess: behind your back, without permission, this turd bucket aliases the hell out of your file system. As a 60 year vet of data recovery, even I could not/can’t sort it out. meantime Apple changed the alias = a good thing, but now trying to deal with old/new alias formats. Have enemies given the affected disks to pro-data recovery outfits = “Sorry, even WE can’t figure this mess out”. I even posted volumes of a detailed  technical descriptions of the mess, complete with diagrams, file system pics, all with arrows showing how convoluted the mess is. In the end, had to start from scratch with a disk format, reinstall of MacOS, and then painfully BEGIN the process of restoring files from the local disk/cloud backups - AFTER NEUTERING what DropBox did to them all. At this point, years later, I’ve spent no less than 250+ hours on this recovery effort, including writing code to de-alias files/folders one at a time.If you use DropBox, you are naïve. It’s Murphy’s Law. modified for DropBox: It is just a matter of time until it screws you, but good, and permanently!

1 Reply

  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    1 hour ago

    Hey Discusted, thanks for taking the time to post to our Community.

    We really appreciate your feedback on this and I'm sorry to hear about your negative experience with the Dropbox desktop app.

    I've passed your comments along to our team and if there's anything else we can do, let us know.

    Thanks.

    P.S. Please note that we are working on an update to the Community, which will be available in read-only mode from Monday, March 30 to Wednesday, April 8.

    For support help during this time, please visit:
    • Dropbox Support
    • Dropbox Help Center
    • Dropbox Learn
    • Our social channels (XFacebook, or Instagram)

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