Dropbox deleted hours of work... but support helped me recover

TidBITS Talk
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I’m going to try to keep this brief.

I believe I reported this here once before as part of some other thread, but I don’t know where. And the details were fuzzy. But it just happened again, and I have better data, so let me share.

I think the way to lose data with Dropbox is something like this:

  1. Edit a file in your Dropbox folder on Mac #1
  2. Let it sync to Mac #2
  3. Dropbox somehow stops running on Mac #2. I frequently find it’s not running because I right-click a file looking for something like “Copy Link” and all the Dropbox-specific contextual menu items are missing. I don’t know if it matters how it stops running: crash vs. something else. I just know I find it not running, and I never quit it
  4. Open that file on Mac #2 and do hours and hours of painstaking work that would kill you to lose
  5. After you’re done all that work and you want to share it, you find Dropbox is not running, so you launch Dropbox
  6. You promptly re-open your file and find ALL YOUR RECENT WORK IS LOST AND DROPBOX HAS REVERTED TO WHATEVER WAS ON Mac #1!!

Note that I do have the top, non-business Dropbox plan. And while it has the Version History feature, the Version History did NOT show anything but the old version with none of the many new changes.

This is not the first time this has happened, and the last time it happened exactly the same way.

There’s a happy ending tonight, though. I hit the Dropbox support chat, and Alec showed me something that is apparently buried in their Help area, but not otherwise navigable through their UI:

https://www.dropbox.com/events

This special link seems to have a much more granular set of file changes than Version History. The latter apparently is limited to versions that Dropbox feels are safely committed and non-corrupt (Alex mentioned something about that). But “Events” seems to be working more busily in the background (THANKFULLY) and had additional (non-committed?) copies of my work. Here you can see a snapshot:

image
image1520×1432 212 KB

(Yes, I just finished composing a delightful little Bossa Nova tune, and really didn’t want to start over from scratch!)

Clicking the hyperlinks on this Events page allowed me to download these various files, and one of them was the completed project, with nothing missing.

So I gave Dropbox an earful about their bad sync algorithm resulting in data loss, making bad choices about what to keep vs. replace. If it is ever unsure, it should at least give you the option to keep your local copy in some offline folder so you can manually compare it to the “live” copy, and decide what to keep, not just throw out your version. For goodness sake, at least put my copy in my Trash so I can pull it out (yes I checked; it wasn’t there). I insisted that he escalate this to the engineers. Hopefully it gets fixed.

Meanwhile, maybe this post will help someone. If no one else, I may be coming back here next time I lose data due to Dropbox, because otherwise I’m not sure how else I will remember this :slight_smile:

Cheers!

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Had that happen back in 2018 when I was in the process of commissioning a new MBPro to replace one that had gone belly-up. Pretty much as you describe.

And it took a phone call to DB support and some patience to see all my files pour back into all my devices. At the time, I believe they had versioning supported but not yet exposed to the end user. The support tech said it was something they were on the verge of rolling out.

I urged him to tell the product managers to get on with it. :wink:

Glad you got your files back.

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It’s probably worth keeping that in mind for other cloud syncing platforms, too.

I’m 99% certain that I’ve seen similar behavior with Google Drive and OneDrive at one point or another, though I can’t recall the last time it happened.

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Yea, they apparently haven’t gotten very far with that! :joy: (Funny, not funny!)

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I don’t get it. The copy it kept was a day old, vs the copy that was ONE MINUTE old. In WHAT UNIVERSE would any algorithm think that was the right choice??

Now, it IS possible that the version I was editing on Mac #2 was not, when I STARTED, as new as the copy from Mac #1 and in the Dropbox cloud (I think it was up to date, or I would have likely noticed something missing; but it’s possible some small edit was not synced to Mac #2 yet). And so Dropbox may have said, “hey, Mac #2 never got the latest edit made on Mac #1, so I should sync it over”. But EVEN IN THAT CASE, if it sees, even just based on Modification Date, that Mac #2’s copy has since changed, it should know it has a conflict it cannot resolve, and take the conservative approach of leaving it up to the user.

Data integrity should be a paramount objective of any service like this, and data loss should be prevented at all costs. I’m appalled.

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This is why I never work in cloud synced folders. Work locally; move a copy to the synced folder when you want to work on it elsewhere. When you’re elsewhere, move a copy to a local folder to work on it and repeat.

It’s so easy to believe the marketing until you collide with the reality: synchronization is hideously difficult and often fails.

Dave

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I’ve never been a heavy Dropbox user, but I have to say it never even occurred to me to work directly in the Dropbox folder. I’ve always done the same, work locally and then move finished work into the Dropbox folder to sync.

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I had something similar happen when setting up a new Mac - I lost a big volume of my Apple Mail when the new Mac was connected to my iCloud data. It used the new Mac’s Mail database (empty) as the truth and deleted all my Mail in iCloud. I was able to recover most of what I lost because I had some ad hoc backups of the (local) Mail database. (For some reason, Time Machine didn’t have the missing mail.) But now I backup all my mail to a local database on the Mac that is also backed up in Time Machine and CCC. Every time I set up a new Mac I worry that this (or something worse) could happen,

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I’m not sure how to begin to explain how regressive that would be to my productivity.

And in general, I will bet that you rely on real-time cloud-synced data elsewhere. Contacts? Calendars? I have had data loss with all of them over the years because of sync bugs. But the benefits are indisposable.

What I do have is versioned backups (via Arq), which generally solves most of the risk of data loss due to sync. But mostly it runs overnight, and I did most of my work in a single day. So there would not have been an off-site versioned backup yet to tap into to find my missing data.