Dropbox deleting entire assets folder

[CVods]

Dropbox deleting entire assets folder. 

I have had a recurring problem with my colleague where every so often our assets folder is completely wiped for one of us but the others are fine. This leads to one of us having to download 2tb of data to be able to get back to work. The most recent time, I opened my hard drive to see everything had gone in the assets folder, I asked my colleague what it looked like on his end and he had a case conflict on his MacBook, this then re-synced on his end by confirming all the files were there. However, it had already deleted everything on my end. 

Can anyone help explain what is causing this and how to avoid it in the future as it is costing us a lot of time? 

[Nancy]

Thanks for posting here today, @CVods. 

Can you please clarify a few things for me? Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean when saying that your “assets” folder is completely wiped for one of you? Does it appear empty for you both on www.dropbox.com and the desktop app, while your colleague can see all files properly?

Let me know, and we can take a look.

[CVods]

Hi Nancy thanks for the reply, 

So the assets folder is the shared folder we use to save video assets, sound and video files take up the bulk of the hard drive space. We upload to there so we can sync files and work on Premiere Projects collaboratively among other things. When I opened the hard drive all the files had been deleted on my end and the dropbox's online portal was showing the same - no files. I told my collegue about this and he then opened his dropbox which had not been live before this point today, when he opened it on his end it came up with a case conflict on the assets folder, dropbox then "synched" but was essential just confirming all the files were in the same place on his end. He then moved the files from his case conflict folder to the original assets folder and they are now downloading on my end again. So when I closed my dropbox/laptop yesterday the files were all there intact and when I opened them again this morning they had gone.  

[Jay]

Hi @CVods, could you try recovering one of the files from the events page, and then check the version history to see which user and device is deleting the files from the shared folder?

[CVods]

So the version history just says that the current version is the most recent and the only version. I think this may be because it was placed back in the original folder from the case conflict. 

[Jay]

Was there any event history for the files that were deleted previously?

[CVods]

No, I'm sorry there's no event history for the previous time as it was a couple of months ago. 

[Nancy]

That is quite bizarre indeed, @CVods. 

In general, Dropbox can’t delete files on its own, unless you/someone else deletes them manually on their end. Is it possible that a third-party app that’s accessing those files is causing this issue?

Also, did you mean above that when your colleague attempted to access the “Assets” folder on their end, all its files had been moved to a new conflicted copy of the folder and they were no longer showing within the original “Assets” folder?