We recently got a call from a panicked customer who had just accidently deleted the Dropbox folder on their PC. Ironically, it was their Dropbox folder which stored their most important Word, Excel and PDF files.
Thankfully, the designers of Dropbox had envisaged such a problem when devising their software and offer their users two data recovery options.
In order to perform data recovery from Dropbox, the steps are rather easy:
1) Open up your Dropbox console
2) Go to “Show Deleted Files” at the top. It is just to the left of the “Search Dropbox” box.
3) All deleted files will appear grey. Select all of the files.
4) Now press on “Restore” link from the top menu. In a lot of cases, this should restore your files.
However, in this case, the deleted files were still not showing. But, Dropbox has another fallback. If you have accidentally deleted files from your Dropbox folder but cannot find them using the “Restore” function from the Dropbox server – you can look in your Dropbox cache folder stored locally on your PC.
1) Open up Windows Explorer
2) Navigate to your Dropbox folder. Usually C:\Users\Username\Documents\Dropbox.cache
3) You should find the deleted files hiding here.
In this case, the customer’s files were indeed hiding in the Dropbox cache folder. We recovered them by simply removing them from the cache folder ad placing them in a folder we created called “Recovered Data”.
We recommended to the customer that ideally they should have another backup as well. Dropbox is a backup medium but does not constitute a complete backup solution. In this case, we recommended to the client that they purchase a 2.5” backup drive and backup software which includes automatic scheduling.
As this data recovery solution was so quick and easy and could be performed remotely, we decided the cost would be gratis. This morning when our courier arrived, we were delighted to find the client, in gratitude, sent us a lovely bottle of of Barolo wine. Cheers.