Deleting files from Dropdox

Published on: August 18, 2025

Dropbox, if you pay for it, will keep deleted files for 30 days. Since a lot of my clients use Dropbox, I do, too. It just makes life easier when dealing with the clients. I use it to keep files synced between Linux Mint and Windows on my dual-boot laptop. I’ve never had to recover a deleted file before.

I recently did a reorganization of my Dropbox folders when I was using Linux Mint. I moved some folders around, renamed a few, and deleted about 16,000 old files. When I next booted to Windows, for some reason, Dropbox decided that, rather than deleting/rearranging the files to reflect what my Linux Mint Dropbox had, it wanted to merge everything from Windows and Linux Mint. All of the deleted files were now back and some of the folders were duplicated in two different places. For example, I had a MyMusic folder with all my music in it. I renamed it Music and now Dropbox has put both Music and MyMusic on my Windows drive.

If you just heard a huge, frustrated sigh, that would be me.

I had spent over 8 hours cleaning up old files and organizing directories and files before this Dropbox debacle. I started cleaning up again and accidentally deleted one directory that had one file I need. It’s a spreadsheet that I can, with some work, recreate. But not to worry! Dropbox has the deleted files saved on the web, so I headed over to dropbox.com and looked through the deleted files. Or I tried to.

What I found out, and it didn’t make me happy, is that if you delete a batch of files at one time, Dropbox won’t always list all of the files associated with that deletion. It may just list a few files and then say “and 132 more.” Not helpful at all. I’m unable to find the spreadsheet file so I have to assume it is one of those “and more” deletions. I cleaned up more than 16,000 files. So my choice now is to restore all the files and redo the deletions or recreate the spreadsheet. I am still trying to figure out which will be the quickest way.

UPDATE: Since I reviewed the files and folders in alphabetical order, it stood to reason that the deletions would be alphabetical. I took a wild guess and restored a set of 116 files and there was my missing spreadsheet. Deleting 115 files is a lot easier than deleting over 16,000 files and a lot easier than recreating the spreadsheet.