Your workflow is unique 👨💻 - tell us how you use Dropbox here.
Forum Discussion
This is my experience with using Mac OS File Provider and Dropbox
I've been a Dropbox user for nearly 20 years. I'm writing this after days of troubleshooting, a brand new 24TB external drive I had to buy for $500, and a workflow that is still not fully restored.
...
Hi Jay, thanks for responding.
Since posting this, the situation has gotten significantly worse. While troubleshooting, a large portion of my files — including 30 years of personal photos — were replaced with zero-byte files silently, with no warning or error from Dropbox. I believe Dropbox confused online-only placeholders with actual file content and synced the empty versions over the real files.
To answer your question: yes, the Dropbox Finder Extension was enabled. But that issue is now secondary — the priority is recovering my data.
I have opened a support ticket and requested an account restore to before March 8, 2026. The support experience has been disappointing for someone who has been a customer for nearly 20 years. I spent $500 on an external drive and days troubleshooting on my own trying to resolve what started as a simple sync failure after renaming some large directories.
I'm sharing this here because I believe others with large libraries (600K+ files) are at risk of the same issue and deserve a clear warning from Dropbox.
Is there any alternative you can suggest? The clock is running and I want to do everything possible to recover my files.
Walter
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHi from me too and thanks for all the additional information mdt1.
Just to make sure we're on the same page, can you send us a screenshot of the Dropbox desktop app's current status and version as shown in your menu bar at the moment?
If you could also share your ticket ID so that we can look it up in our system, I'd appreciate it.
