Searching in deleted files by name

[Kris_G]

How can I search in the deleted files. So far the only way I can look through them is scroll. And that can take a very long time :).

[Walter]

Hey @Kris_G, thanks for using Dropbox and welcome to the Community!
 

Apart from scrolling through your deleted files and using the filters to refine your search in the right hand pane, the only thing I could suggest here is using the CTRL+F shortcut when in your deleted files page to search for the files you're looking for. 

I hope this helps a tad. 

[Kris_G]

The control F is a good tip, but I only see a small portion of the files at a time and my deleted section is tens of thousands of little files 🤣

[leopinheiro]

Same problem here

[Saldor]

I was facing the same situation. There was a specific file I knew I used to have, and now it was nowhere to be found. I learned that searching for deleted files through the Dropbox web interface was impossible. I didn't know when I deleted it or what folder it was in, so I couldn't use those attributes for filtering. I have deleted 10,000 files a month in the last 13 years, so scrolling through them was not an option.

What I did was ask ChatGPT to write a Python program for me to list all deleted files recursively in my Dropbox account. It took a couple of hours for the program to run, but now I have a 112 MB file with 1.5 million deleted files listed. And I did find my deleted file among those so that I could restore it.

So there is a way to find that lost file!

[Magrid T.]

This is really frustrating. I find myself losing more and more hours trying to find files for my team. We have a business plan for 10+ years, and it is amazing how Dropbox can keep our deleted files (and versions of them) for a long time. But finding something among the thousands and thousands of deleted files in our history is today impossible. The search through deleted files does not work at all. I know the period, I know who deleted it - and then it loads 20 files or so on screen, and I would need to scroll, scroll, scroll through eternity (taking a while to load the next 20 names). Why can't we search the deleted files for a word? We are considering doing local back-ups again!