I have been using Dropbox for years now and I have never once had a problem with it…until a week ago when over 2000 files mysteriously vanished from my Dropbox account.

For the record, I love Dropbox – to the point where Dropbox is now integral to running my business – here are two examples:

Dropbox Lightroom Catalog Sync – How To Set It Up

5 Tips to Use Dropbox for Small Business

However, when 2000 files go missing (many critical) I have been forced to decide if I need to cancel my Dropbox account and look for a safer and more reliable cloud file storage solution.

In this article, I will explain how my files were deleted and what you can do to make sure that yours are safe – if you use a Samsung phone and Dropbox – make sure you read this!!!

How Over 2000 Files Were Accidentally Deleted from Dropbox

I use a Samsung phone. I’ve had it for years. However, the internal memory card was getting full, so while looking through the storage on my phone I noticed a whole pile of files in the Documents folder and deleted them.

I don’t ever save any documents to my phone (anything important goes to Dropbox – do you see where this is going?…), so I didn’t think anything of it – I wasn’t sure what was there or why they were there – all I knew was that they were taking up space so I cleared out the folder.

It took over a week to notice that anything was missing from Dropbox.

I would go to open a file and it would be gone. Hmmm weird, oh well, I must have deleted that.

Until I went to open some tax documents that I was SURE I did not delete – they were gone too. So I checked the deleted files and noticed that in addition to the file I was looking for, there were a few other files that had been deleted from the same folder.

OK – I must have made a mistake and deleted the whole folder – no problem, I can restore them.

It took a few days and more missing files before I really realized that most of the Word, Excel and PDF files that are stored in Dropbox had vanished. All of my photos and videos were still there – but I finally realized that there were a ton of document files that had been deleted.

At this point, I knew that I had all these files backed up, and because I had realized that they had been deleted within Dropbox’s 30 day recovery window, everything could be recovered directly from Dropbox (however I have to admit that I was dreading the prospect of manually recovering all these files folder by folder).

And I wanted to know WTF happened!

As it turns out, Samsung has a special “DocumentSync” folder on their devices that is linked with Dropbox. I had no idea that this folder existed or that it was even connected to Dropbox (it’s not the Dropbox app), but when I deleted those files from my phone’s Documents folder to make space – the Samsung app then also deleted the original copies in Dropbox.

Poof – over 2000 documents gone (literally overnight).

What Did Dropbox Customer Support Do About It?

For some reason, Dropbox does not have a way for a user to restore mass files. You can view all the files that you’ve deleted in the past 30 days (the window you have available to recover them), but you have to restore them one at a time.

You can restore groups of files folder by folder – but even that would have taken me all day.

So I put in a support ticket with Dropbox.

At first I was pretty ticked off that there is no live chat or phone support – this was a bit of an emergency that I wanted sorted out right away.

It took a few hours for them to respond, but in the end I’m pretty happy with Dropbox support – they restored all my deleted files, figured out exactly what had happened and gave me precise instructions to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Here is the email I received from Dropbox support:

Aldo, Nov 3, 1:08 PM PDT: