I lost some of my files as they've been deleted. Can you shed some light?

[MikeCryer]

I have a basic DropBox account. I had an email a few weeks ago to say that I was running out of space. Problem is, I have access to three different areas through my account. One personal, one a community organisation I'm involved with and third our family business that I am a director of (basic admin files). So although the DropBox 'storage full' message was sent to me, it was not at all clear which of the three areas it applied to - just one or all of them. The only one that I originally set up was my personal one. 

Today I went in and both personal files and the community organisation's files had been deleted. A lot of them. There was no warning apart from that email and I think a reminder. 

What I would like to know is this:

Is the reason files have been deleted because of the lack of space?

What can I do to recover them?

Is there a human being I can speak to about this? DropBox seems a faceless organisation, but this is pretty serious if we have lost files.

[Walter · Accepted solution]

Hi @MikeCryer; welcome aboard!

Truth be told, Dropbox would never delete files due to a lack in available quota on your Dropbox account(s); in case you're over your account's quota, only syncing stops.

That said, note that deletion events can sometimes happen when someone reorganizes files in a new location or moves them to their desktop. Since the files are no longer in the Dropbox folder, those changes are synced to both the website and other connected devices.

Your best bet here would be to take a look at your deleted files page or even your account's events page as this is the place where all adds, edits and deletes are normally logged and might offer you more insight on what exactly might have happened.

I hope this helps and please let me know how you get on Mike! 

[MikeCryer]

Thanks for your reply. We did manage to recover the files from the 'deleted files' process so have not lost anything. but it's still a bit of a mystery as to why they disappeared. I'm going to start backing up more frequently, even though that rather defeats the object of cloud-based storage, but better safe than sorry.

[adambtolbert]

As walter already gives you the best answer to your question. It helped you to find your lost files. I really appreciated it. I also want to add some lines that we always keep the synchronize on and if the redundancy occur files migrated by Dropbox. One more thing if any situation you find yourself in a data loss situation we can also use third party free data recovery programs in our local machine to recover. Recuva or stellar data recovery free edition is able to recover lost, deleted data efficiently.  

[MikeCryer]

Thanks Adam. Useful tips. Didn't think of data recovery on my own PC, but that would have worked too.