Catastrophic failure and a big design flaw.

[Henri2]

This is a rant/feedback/warning for others and I am asking for a few good tips as well. Dropbox caused me another week of extra vacation from paid work and substituted some hard drive work instead.

I have suffered two unacceptable issues:

1: Some time ago all my content was deleted and replaced with another person's content. Yes, all of it. His medical bills, photos, etc., and my company data were deleted. Luckily I had another PC offline and was able to return all 500000+ files back manually. This is sorted out now and I won't reveal to anyone how to replicate this. I felt that the support team was not interested that much in the time I wrote to them. I expected a serious attitude, escalating the issue and personal contact. Video proof still exists and I deleted all this other person's files. This ain't a large-scale risk but very possible with specific circumstances.

2: Now I changed Plan to more expensive in order to allow make a password to the links I share (the only reason). The result is that Dropbox basically broke my SolidWorks, Lightroom, Davinci Resolve, Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.  - software that uses folder structures. Dropbox had an idea to add my name at the top of the folder structure and clear the local Dropbox and download every file again. Furthermore, my name has an "illegal" character in this English world. Now every service that has file links, is broken. There are thousands of files. How this kind of idea to change folder structure is even gone through by the R&D committee. Once file structure is nailed it stays forever.

Good ideas to revert it all are highly appreciated. Now I think the best option is to wait two days of downloading it all and then manually create the whole structure locally with a new account. I don't know how to dissolve this business account due it has my name in the structure. I can Cut all files from under the highest level folder and Paste them back as were but what it breaks then.

A private cloud has some point indeed.

[Hannah]

Hey @Henri2, thank you for posting and I'm sorry to hear about your experience.

This sounds like you joined a Dropbox Business team or perhaps created a Dropbox Business trial, could that be the case?

When an account switches from personal to Business, the Dropbox folder structure does indeed change, with a team member folder (the folder with your name) getting added, containing the user's existing files.

Switching back to an individual (Basic, Plus, Professional) account, though, should return your structure to how it was before. 

Let me know if you see something else or if you have any more questions.

[joeldgilbert]

A workaround for the path change is to use mklink to create a virtual Directory Junction between the actual folder and a virtual location.

In a command prompt type: mklink /j [Link Folder] [Target Folder]

So if your original file location was C:\CAD_Stuff but Dropbox moved it to C:\Users\yourname\Dropbox\CAD_Stuff you would type:

mklink /j "C:\CAD_Stuff" "C:\Users\yourname\Dropbox\CAD_Stuff"

Microsoft Documentation for mklink:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mklink