Dropbox noticed that the files were gone, and so it deleted them from everyone else's laptops, too. When he left his office, he unplugged from the university's network, and (obviously), the files on the network server vanished from his laptop. So he stored his copies of the files in Dropbox on the university's network server. Joe installed Dropbox on his laptop but didn't want all of Riley's files on the laptop's hard drive. If a file is removed from the folder, Dropbox automatically removes it from everyone's hard drives, even the person who owns the folder. When you sync files, Dropbox automatically updates all copies of the file on everyone's hard drives. It turns out, this situation was due to how Dropbox handles shared folders when using network drives.ĭropbox has a feature called sync. It showed that Joe was the culprit, but Joe insisted he didn't delete any of the files. The whole Dropbox folder that Joe had been given access to had been wiped out," Riley told us.ĭropbox has a feature that allows you to see which person deleted files. "I tried to do some work and I couldn't find any of the data. It all began a few weeks after he had shared a folder with a colleague named "Joe." He shared his story with Business Insider to warn others.
Let's just say he's not a technical Luddite.īut it took him days to unravel this baffling problem with Dropbox, in which about 600 of his files were mysteriously deleted, and then restored, and then deleted again.Īnd not just from his folder, but from the hard drives of six of his colleague's laptops which had linked to the folder. He's a renewable energy expert and an electrical engineer leading a project to build a cooking stove for developing countries that generates electricity by burning wood or dung. But recently he had a terrifying experience in which hundreds of his files suddenly vanished. Paul Riley, a researcher at the University of Nottingham, loves Dropbox.
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