Error syncing Mac to Drop Box

[ld13e]

Hello!

I just downloaded Drop Box onto my Mac. It said it qas syncing and then complete.

The only item I selected for it to sync were Documents. The documents are now gone from my desktop but they are NOT on my Dropbox. There were two folders on my desktop previously. One is on Drop box but I cannot open it because it says localized. The other is missing completely. I thought maybe the sync process was actually paused. However, there is no option on the menu to resume or anything. I saw a trick on going into your Mac trash and looking at hidden documents but there are few few documents there in comparison to what was in my folders. Now I cannot access my documents or see them anywhere. They are lost!

Please help!

[Jay]

Hi @ld13e, thanks for messaging today!

Are you able to view your missing files online in the files page?

Were there any recent events, or deleted files, which could tell you what happened to the files?

If you need any further assistance, please let me know!

[judefreeman]

My wife is experiencing the same issue with our family acccount.  She setup Dropbox and set it to backup her Desktop and Documents.  Then this morning she went to open something and both Desktop and Documents were gone.  

They are not in the Trash folder, and they are nowhere to be found on her computer.  We need help with this ASAP.

[judefreeman]

So I did some serious digging into her machine and I found out the problem was self caused.  Naturally at 5:00 AM this morning when everything was gone it was an emergency, but with some coffee and searching I found the problem.  Not sure if this will impact anyone else, but here's the issue for my wife.

She had a previous installation and account with Dropbox, and when we moved to the family plan she used a different account.  So what happend is Dropbox moved all of her documents and desktop items to an OLD folder.  Not sure why they would have moved files from those folders, but they did.  Seems like it would have made more sense to have left those files in the Documents and Desktop folders without moving them to an archived folder.

This feels like a flaw in the program that should be looked into.

[Jay]

Hi @judefreeman, I'm glad to hear you were able to locate your files. 

When you sign out of your Dropbox account and into a new one on the Dropbox desktop application, to prevent data loss, the old Dropbox folder is renamed with an 'Old' suffix.

This helps to keep the files safe, instead of syncing them to the new account automatically, which might not be wanted by the user.

If you need any further assistance, please let me know!

[judefreeman]

While I’m glad we were able to recover the files I still think it shouldn’t remove those files from the places they existed. Maybe that’s juts my opinion though.