…but hoo boy did i have a Very Bad Weekend with regards to Dropbox. At this point I do not require assistance. I’m just regaling you with the tale of Catie’s Very Bad Dropbox Experience.
So. I discovered late-ish last year that I had some kind of catastrophic Dropbox failure EARLY last year for things I don’t need 99.9% of the time, so I only discovered it months after the fact. Like, in the end, it turned out that nearly half my files were showing as zero bytes. To the REALLY TENTATIVE best of my ability to tell, I rearranged some directories for better workflow/searchability/consistency & Dropbox just basically noped out of actually moving any of the content & zeroed everything out.
When I discovered this, Dropbox was like “sux 2 b U lol,” like, almost literally. I was told in no uncertain terms that I was shit out of luck because I was only paying enough for a month of restored files if there was a disaster, after which they unceremoniously closed the ticket before I could even respond. So I was pretty infuriated, but also, it seemed like most of the files were things I could replace/relatively unimportant.
Except I kept. finding. more. corrupted. files. And I had what I thought was a secure backup at home, except I was wrong (I do have backups, just not recent enough, bc hi i’m human), and…
Look, it’s been absolutely horrible. There was an incredily, incredibly bad moment this morning when I thought I’d lost some REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF, but in my attempt to back up what I HAD, I found instructions from Dropbox itself on how to check on an individual file, and…
…it appears that the fuckery is with the syncs. Everything appears to be safe on dropbox.com itself. Which is a huge relief, obviously. So I’m downloading everything to an external drive…
…except the external drive won’t talk to my Mac ::sobs with hysterical laughter::…
…except it seems maybe I’ve now figured out how to do that (I have to reboot the computer, so I’m finishing part of this blog post first), and I hope to shit it works because MY MAC’S HARD DRIVE IS NOW TOO FULL TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING ELSE ::WEEPS HYSTERICALLY::
by the time you read this, it will either be solved or not, so, uh, brb, i’ll let you know
(twenty stressful minutes later)
OH MY GOD I GOT IT TO WORK
okay, okay, step one, copy everything i’ve downloaded so far to the backup drive
step two will be to see if i can sync some VERY UNIMPORTANT file back to dropbox so it’s actually got a fucking value again
ooooooh those fucking fuckers. as i was trying to stop an unintentional dropbox backup to my hard drive, i came across this:
“Online-only files on Mac:
This displays online-only file sizes in Mac Finder as zero bytes so you can easily review which files are taking up hard drive space.”
This is not ON, but seems to be what fucking happened. Except I couldn’t open those files so maybe that’s NOT what was happening but jesus h CHRIST what a clusterfuck.
(two hours later)
OKAY.
At this point I’ve backed up everything but the photos, which I’m going to have to do directly onto the external drive if it’s at all possible, but afaict I’m going to need to finally, grudgingly, update my Dropbox to whatever the new version is to make that work. In the meantime: I have, experimentally, copied one of the smaller folders (which is backed up on the external hard drive) into Dropbox to see if the files inside it sync. They seem to be doing so. The original folders are still corrupted on the desktop.
I could scream, but I believe most of the crisis is averted.
At this point I appear to have to wait for Dropbox to, IDK, sync everything? That seems to be what it’s doing right now, for reasons that I don’t get, like, I have no idea what’s going to happen when it’s done. Will my original files in their directories be restored? Will my entire Dropbox be empty? WHO KNOWS?
Anyway, I’ve deleted the desktop backup now so I have room to download the photos folders (one. at. a. time. because. very. large.) and…well, look, if the entire Dropbox ends up empty, at least I can restore it all from these backups.
::goes away to drink heavily::
(At least one of you is going to want to make helpful suggestions about hosting my own cloud server and Synology and other stuff. I’ve got it covered. Or, at least, I’m beginning to get it covered, thanks to advice from network admins on Bluesky. I mean, like, look, like everybody I’m kinda looking to move away from billionaire-owned tech/media but THIS WAS NOT HOW I WANTED TO BE INSPIRED TO GET MY ACT TOGETHER ON IT.)