Prevent Accidental Moving or Deletion of Files/Folders

[Roy K.]

I accidentally moved my folders today by mistakenly clicking on it. My question is, is there a way to prevent this from happening, like adding a prompt if a folder is going to be moved or deleted? It will prevent accidental moving or deletion of files/folders.

[Mark · Accepted solution]

No

Moves etc, are handled by your operating system NOT Dropbox

[DaveC2]

Change the permissions on the folders in your operating system so you cant move or erase them.

[Bart M.]

This would be a very useful feature for Dropbox to implement.  

If Dropbox cannot add a prompt, could they maybe mimic permissions set on the owners folders to other people's shared folders, so that moving and deleting is more difficult? 

[Gregory T.2]

I accidentally deleted my Dropbox folder on a local desktop - it was a slip of the finger - instead of a click on the folder, i hel the mouse a sevond too long and dagged the folder to the adjacent folder, which my OS "interpreted" as a Delete folder operation.

(I recovered all files  though it took me some time to figure out what was going on, and how to fix the problem, and then a couple of hours to download all the deleted files again. )

sure, it's my fault.   

 Still, this is not a very secure system, if such a simple error can occur. It would be nice to have at least some interaction with dropbox.com, which asks, "do you really want to delete all these folders???"

[David M.150]

Agreed - would be extremely helpful to have some sort of prompt or pop-up on the desktop Dropbox program that would give you one chance to stop the train before all your 2016 client files end up copied into a totally unrelated folder and take days to sync both ways...

[Server_Align]

I agree it would be very nice, however totally unpractical to implement.

The reason is the dropbox app only watches the dropbox folder for changes, and then replicates those to the cloud.

So has no interaction with the move or delete event in explorer or otherwise until it has completed, and only then is it informed of the loosing end of the move/delete (assuming its out of the dropbox folder).

A quick analogy would be to hope a smoke detector would stop the fire from happening. Its great at what it does, but cant prevent what it detects.

[Atle J.]

Hi. In my case I have the files only in the Dropbox cloud, not locally. Purpose is mainly for backup of my pictures and videos. Would it be possible to protect them from being deleted in any way? I'd say it's a short way from adding this folder to a computer and then deleting it by accident. A simple parameter on a folder saying 'delete protection' would be perfect for backup purposes.

[Mark]

It isnt possible, no.

[Robert P.28]

All of a sudden many files are missing from my Dropbox without me deleting them. These are files that I do not have on my desktop, only in Dropbox, and now not there. I do have them  backed up on a separate hard drive but this is a serious problem if I can't trust Dropbox to retain my files.