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Restore

Dropbox: How to recover deleted files and folders using “Events”

By Video

I recently made a huge mistake in Dropbox. From my desktop computer, I deleted two folders — one shared, and one not — that collectively contained more than 9,000 files, including mission-critical files for my business. I watched in horror as Dropbox synced the deletion to my master Dropbox account, which then replicated to all other devices linked to the same Dropbox account.

Now, if you have read my book Dropbox In 30 Minutes or have seen some of my other videos, you know there is a relatively easy way to restore deleted Dropbox files using the Dropbox.com website. You can see the video here.

But, when you’ve deleted thousands of files and hundreds of folders, it’s a huge hassle to manually restore all of them. It can take hours to hunt around on Dropbox.com, find the trashed folders and files, and right-click to restore them.

Fortunately, Dropbox offers a way to get back all of the files and folders at once. It involves the “Events” tab on the Dropbox.com website, which is a list of all Dropbox activities (updates, deletions, etc.) going back one month. The video below describes how to do it. This is the method I used to get my 9,000+ files and folders back to the way they had been before.

Note that this method will not work if the deletion event took place more than one month ago. In addition, if you have added files and folders to your Dropbox account since the deletion event, it may cause issues when you try to restore using the Events link.

Without further ado, here’s the video: