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"Unshared file/folder by clearing membership" mystery user action

Almost all folders deleted / rewind does not work / Unshared File/Folder by Clearing Membership

astra3007
Explorer | Level 4

Today almost all of our folders are gone.

In the activity log I can not find any deletion from our side but strange activity from "Dropbox Support" saying "Unshared File/Folder by Clearing Membership".

I can see the deleted folders from the admin panel but when I try to rewind them it says either the folder is empty or the folder can not be rewind because it has moved....?

 

Dropbox support, of course, is not available at all and I need the data, we can not work.

 

How can something like this happen and how do we get our data back?

31 Replies 31

Mark
Super User II

Once a folder is unshared you lose all history of it so it cannot be restored. The fix is to RESHARE and rejoin it. 

 

Can you do that at https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/rejoin-shared-folder


 


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astra3007
Explorer | Level 4

Share with whom ? These were my folders created by me. With whom should I share them to recover them ?

 

wk_
Explorer | Level 4

@astra007 did you ever get an answer for this? 

wk_
Explorer | Level 4

bump 

astra3007
Explorer | Level 4

I never got an answer how this could happen.

It took the Dropbox support 5 days to fix the issue and I never got an explanation nor an apology

wk_
Explorer | Level 4

Thank you for your reply

wk_
Explorer | Level 4

I am the admin on our account, and we have a very troubling issue that appears to have occurred on our account wherein thousands upon thousands of files have been unshared with me, the top user in the hierarchy, effectively deleting them.  The culprit is a mystery user named "Dropbox Support". These files are not available to rewind, and they do not appear in the deleted files section of the admin console (beacuse they weren't deleted, they were unshared). I've seen several threads here where this has happened to other users, but have seen very little in the way of resolution to the issue posted to the forums.

 

I will be updating this thread as I work through it with the heroes at Dropbox support, for the sake of future users who may encounter this very troubling issue. Needless to say, our business has screeched to a halt, in Week 1 of an 8 week sprint, and the very fact that this can happen points to a serious vulnerability in using Dropbox Business as a core part of our operations. 

jonathoncole
New member | Level 2

Did you ever get a solution on this?  

wk_
Explorer | Level 4

Yes, we did. It took the team 2 weeks to get everything restored. There was very little in the way of an explanation, but we suspect that it happened because me, the admin of the account, moved my Dropbox drive to an external SSD, and it had a bit of a blip in the connection and that somehow triggered this weird permissions error on this one folder (that was synced locally) that made the files appear like they were gone, but the permissions had just changed. 

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