My Photos Disappeared After Moving to Dropbox Folder and Uploading
TL;DR: If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again. Without making a mistake, you might lose your files.
I started using Dropbox back in 2009 and accept ever loved the service. Over time, I kept moving more than and more files to my Dropbox folder and eventually had to upgrade to the Pro plan to go along up with the space requirements. In particular, I moved there all of my photos in club to be able to view/share them online and also to accept them backed up.
In April of this year, a difficult drive in my laptop was running low on space so I decided to apply the Dropbox's Selective Sync characteristic to unsync some big directories from the laptop. Because in that location was never any trouble with the service and also because it'southward already the year 2014, I thought it might be about time that one can trust a cloud-based storage service and utilise them as a sole backup of their files. Boy, I was wrong.
On April 29th 2014, I opened the Selective Sync dialog, unchecked directories chosen 2003, 2004, …, 2014 from the Photos binder (and few other directories) and clicked the 'Update' button. After that, the Dropbox client froze and didn't show any sign of life for a couple of minutes, so I decided to impale information technology and restart it again. These directories are large and they might exist likewise big of a bite for Dropbox, I idea, and unsynced them 1 by one instead.
Everything worked well, the directories disappeared from the local difficult drive, merely they were still available on Dropbox's website. All skilful.
Almost two months afterwards when I was preparing for a defence of my PhD thesis, I was looking for an onetime presentation but couldn't discover information technology. The directory was there but it was empty. I would have never deleted these files, something must take gone wrong.
I contacted Dropbox back up, who then broke the news to me: in that location was a delete event of 8343 files from 2014-04-29 at 14:57:30 GMT (UTC). Looking at the log record from this consequence, I realized nearly of the missing files were my photos! All the directories were still in identify simply many of them were empty, every bit if Dropbox randomly deleted some files and left some others intact. I was devastated. All those memories and the try with collecting and organizing the photos… gone.
From all this information it seems that Dropbox customer get-go deletes files locally before information technology informs the server nigh the new selective sync settings. Consequently, if the client crashes or is killed earlier the server is contacted, the files remain deleted without any trace. After the customer restarts again, information technology but sees there are some files missing and syncs this new state with the server.
Unfortunately for me, Dropbox only keeps a copy of deleted files for xxx days (unless you pay $twoscore/yr for some Packrat feature) and I constitute out about this event after two months.
For me information technology's nearly likely over, there is nix I can do now, mayhap try to become some photos dorsum from my friends who went on the same trips… Anyway, I decided to share this story publicly for three reasons:
- A bit of publicity might convince Dropbox to put some extra try and maybe observe a style to restore my files.
- To let other Dropbox users know about this event so that this doesn't happen to them. Basically afterward doing any major changes in Dropbox settings, one should check the Events page on Dropbox website to make sure no files got deleted.
- Dropbox team can use information from this story to fix the problem. Here are few suggestions what tin be done:
- Make the application of the selective sync settings transactional, either is succeeds completely or fails gracefully.
- Enable the Packrat feature by default for every paying client, without any actress price. Looking at the storage plan pricing for Google Bulldoze, there surely is a space for you to do that. Or, at least, keep the delete history as long as the deleted files fit into user'due south quota, it'due south a space users already paid for.
- Apply machine learning to detect a strange activity on user accounts and notify users by email if it happens. For example, nigh of my activity over the years consists of adding large number of new files and changing/deleting a small number files from time to time. A sudden deletion of 8343 files is surely a strange activity in this context..
Update (7/30/fourteen): Yesterday night I got an email from Dropbox maxim that they worked with their engineering team and were able to restore 1463 files. As well I received some credit for my futurity use of the service. Meliorate than nothing.
PS: At least I defended my PhD thesis even without that lost presentation, but the photos are gone nonetheless.
PPS: For the sake of abyss, you can read a complete tape of my advice with the Dropbox support past clicking here and scrolling to the lesser.
About the writer: Jan Čurn is a Ph.D. student in the Distributed Systems Group of the Department of Computer Scientific discipline at Trinity College Dublin and a CTO at VirtualRig Studio, an application for creating realistic motion blur for professional car photography. You tin learn more than nigh Čurn by heading over to his website or following him on Twitter. This article originally appeared hither.
Source: https://petapixel.com/2014/07/31/cautionary-tale-bug-dropbox-permanently-deleted-8000-photos/
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