Dropbox Folders Disappeared

[zootyzoot]

Today, hundreds and thousands of critically important documents and materials affecting the livelihoods of nearly 1,000 people suddenly went missing from one of our team Dropbox folders. Nobody deleted anything. The Activity Log lists practically everything that disappeared and, for each such thing, says: "Unshared file/folder by clearing membership." I have no idea what this means, but this is a CODE RED problem that needs to be addressed IMMEDIATELY and customer support was useless. I will track down Drew Houston and camp outside the front door of his house unless this is resolved by tomorrow at Noon. You cannot market a product like this and allow people to rely so heavily upon it (or even encourage them to leave all their files in the cloud) and then erase virtually everything they have worked on for 30 months. An outage of even five minutes is unacceptable. But this is evidence of severe problems with the Dropbox system that should cause any prospective customer to conclude that they need to find a better file-collaboration solution.

[Jay]

Hi @zootyzoot, thanks for posting today.

I understand your concern over the matter of the missing files.

The message you provided indicates that this was a shared folder which was fully unshared by the owner of the folder.

This removes all members of the folder, and makes the folder private to the specific owner. Due to this, it wouldn't be possible to recover the folder from the events page or the deleted files page for privacy purposes.

Are you able to contact the owner of the folder to invite you back to the folder?

Please keep me updated with any progress.

[zootyzoot]

It is MY folder, and I never unshared it. EVER. Nobody on my team can find it. This is a Dropbox issue. They need someone to recover these files lickety-split, no **bleep**. There are 1,000 people whose livelihoods depend on these files being restored ASAP. They are still missing. Dropbox is not ready to market its system to the public if there are flaws with the product that are this severe.

[WiLiam1]

Ow, really bad how it was happened.

[Jay]

Depending on your current plan, you can contact the support team directly for them to provide further assistance on this matter.

Once you get a ticket ID from the automated response, please let me know the number here so I can locate it in our system.

[TomP2]

Did you ever get an answer to this? Same thing just happened to us - critical folders deleted with this same "by clearing membership" message (and overnight when no one accessing/using dropbox).

[zootyzoot]

Customer service finally restored all the files. The technicians was fairly astute, but his explanation as to why all the Dropbox files suddenly disappeared was confusing and didn't hold up to further inquiry. As it turned out, one of my employees deleted all the files from her laptop, but those were MY files so she shouldn't have been in a position to trigger the complete deletion of all of those files from everyone else's computer.