Dropbox link for files - "This item was deleted" or "That didn't work for some reason"

[Terramisu]

Can you please clarify how Dropbox works in the following scenarios:

1) Does the Dropbox link for a file remain the same if the filename is changed at all (ie. but it remains the same file and in same folder)?

2) Does the Dropbox link for a file remain the same if you move that file to another folder within the same Dropbox account (with the same folder permissions)?

3) If the Dropbox link for a file was captured and pasted into our company documentation/index by employee named (for example) Fred, and then Fred left our organisation/company so was no longer using our company Dropbox account - would that link still work for the remaining employees?

Background:

As a company > team, working on files together, we share file Dropbox links (from our company Dropbox account) with each other. We do this alot, and these Dropbox links to certain files are stored within our internal process documentation etc also. And everyone in the team has the same level of access to all the Dropbox folders.   

We've come across quite a number of links that now result in the error "This item was deleted", or "That didn't work for some reason". 

We don't know why this is happening. We're not sure if it's tied to employees having been deprovisioned from our company Dropbox, or it's potentially multiple different things! 

And it's becoming a big issue for our productivity. 

Thanks in advance.

[Jay]

Hi @Terramisu, thanks for messaging the Community.

If the filename is changed, the shared link would be unaffected by the change. Moving it to another folder would only affect it if it was a folder with restricted sharing in a Dropbox Business team.

Were the shared links created a while ago? There is a new change to shared links, which can be seen here, which may answer some of your questions.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.

[Terramisu]

Thanks @Jay.

Yes some of the links are 6+ months old.

I'm not very technical, but in reading through that other thread you linked, yes I suspect we could be impacted by the shared links change by Dropbox. But I don't really understand it well enough to figure it out. 

But I don't think it explains why our links are changing. 

I have a specific example that's typical of our issue, and it doesn't make sense to us at all...

We created a Dropbox link to a file on 3 Feb 2023. 

At this time we shared it internally - both in our internal company "wikipedia" page, and also in Slack to announce this new resource for team use (when it was released internally).

• File link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/somenumbers&letters/filename.pptx?dl=0

That link now doesn't work = "File deleted" error in Dropbox.

So now I've manually navigated within our Dropbox folders and located the file which should be the file above.

But I discover the Dropbox link for this file is different to the original link.

• File link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/differentnumbers&letters/filename.pptx?dl=0

I strongly suspect it's the exact same file.... It's in the same (original) Dropbox folder location where the Slack announcement message said it would be, and the Dropbox Version history of this file shows it's been in that location since the Slack announcement message.

So why has the Dropbox link for this file changed? 

This is above is symptomatic of what we have happening across many of our files right now. And it's causing us alot of pain in our work productivity. We need to solve it to fix all our dead links to Dropbox files! Especially when some of the file links have no filename in them, just some random looking code in the link - super difficult/impossible to find the OG destination file. 

Additionally (another mystery to us):

Using my Desktop (Windows OS) File Explorer, to right-click on the file and copy the Dropbox link (1) <-- this results in a different link to when I'm in Dropbox.com to copy the Dropbox link for this same file (2)...

1. Desktop (Windows OS) File Explorer file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/differentnumbers&letters/filename.pptx?dl=0
2. Dropbox.com copy link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/numbers&letters/filename.pptx?rlkey=letters&numbers&dl=0 

....What is going on?!

(my head hurts!)

Thanks again for your help.

[Jay]

If the link you mentioned in Slack was different, then it means that, at some point, the original link was deleted and a new one was created by someone. This can happen by deleting the link directly, or deleting the original file and saving it in the same place and having to create another link. 

Sometimes, if you save a file, this will in fact delete the original file (and link) and save a new one, instead of overwriting it to keep the shared link.

This post in another thread might also explain the difference you're seeing between the desktop app and the site, as it hasn't been rolled out to all accounts and devices.