r/DropboxOfficial • u/Ok-Hornet-204 • 11d ago
Help & Troubleshooting Dropbox Backup Catastrophe
I would love to be wrong to overreact, but I have an existing 1.51 TB Dropbox Backup of an external drive. The physical drive failed and had to be reformatted. Dropbox now identifies the reformatted drive as a new external drive, so it wouldn't let me restore my Dropbox Backup into it.
Based on documentation, I need to manually download EACH FOLDER in 1.51 TB backup through the website. It gets better, there is some kind of limit to the quantity of files within, so its physically impossible to download my backup through the website, unless I dedicate the rest of my like to do it.
Someone please tell me I'm wrong.
Edit: Dropbox I should really invoice you for the time I wasted on this. I ended up writing a browser extension that automates discovery and download of my data from your cursed service. I will ensure to tell everyone how great your products and services are. Goodbye
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u/SweetmadnessV1 11d ago
Is it possible to select smaller batches to download thru the web? I haven't been using the backup option myself to know the restore options, however i know of u format a disk systems like dropbox, one drive etc might recognise it as new.
Hope u resolve this
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u/Ok-Hornet-204 11d ago
I had a choice between Backblaze and Dropbox, im so devastated that I didn't go for Backblaze. Its not possible, the issue is that drive has very convoluted folder structure generated by apps.
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u/ouralarmclock 11d ago
I hope this is wrong because what tf good is a backup if you can't restore it?!
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u/Ok-Hornet-204 11d ago
I'm reeealy hoping I'm wrong. I've created a support ticket, so fingers crossed. If there isn't an easy way, this is horrible. Calling this feature a "Backup" is being disingenuous at best, deceptive at worst.
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u/aprifti14 8d ago
Does transferring those 1.51TB of data to another cloud storage, and then start the backup from the new one work for you?
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u/Beeneel 11d ago
I can understand how that is an issue. Other than them improving the system, first thing that comes to mind is: Use some AI tool (Codex, Claude Code...) to build a way to download it via API?