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- Aug 20, 2006
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This article is merely entertaining if you stay within the headline, but it becomes disturbing once you get into the story and realize that Dropbox’s policy is to keep deleted files only for 30 days. Ever the cynic, I will go ahead and consider the possibility that the file hosting service has been consciously keeping files around forever. The company does blame a “bug” that was “preventing some files and folders from being fully deleted”—but that seems like quite the slip up for something that is clearly spelled out in their retention policy.
By default, Dropbox saves deleted and previous versions of files for 30 days in case you want to recover them. After the 30-day mark, the deleted files are marked for deletion in our system and are purged from our servers. They can no longer be recovered after that point. A bug was preventing some files and folders from being fully deleted off of our servers, even after users had deleted them from their Dropbox accounts. While fixing the bug, we inadvertently restored the impacted files and folders to those users’ accounts. This was our mistake; it wasn’t due to a third party and you weren’t hacked.
By default, Dropbox saves deleted and previous versions of files for 30 days in case you want to recover them. After the 30-day mark, the deleted files are marked for deletion in our system and are purged from our servers. They can no longer be recovered after that point. A bug was preventing some files and folders from being fully deleted off of our servers, even after users had deleted them from their Dropbox accounts. While fixing the bug, we inadvertently restored the impacted files and folders to those users’ accounts. This was our mistake; it wasn’t due to a third party and you weren’t hacked.