This year has been a great one for cloud based services, if by great you mean they’ve all suffered at the hands of hackers or bugs. One cloud solution has managed to stay above it all though, until now. Bad news for people who use Dropbox as they have confirmed that a bug in some older version of its dekstop app has deleted user files from the cloud.
On the upside Dropbox says it is trying to restore the lost file where and when it can but this will be slow process, it’s also working to fix the bug via updates and preventing the old version form working anymore. More bad news: it can’t restore all the lost files.
The problem only applies to users who turned on Selective Sync, which limits cloud syncs to specified folders. These syncs are usually set up to occur after something like a serious crash which has, in a few cases, made the problem incredibly frustrating—a few users seem to have reported that they’ve lost years’ worth of content. Let’s hope they get it back, one thing is for sure though they will remember to keep more than one copy now.
If you’ve been affected, Dropbox should be getting in touch via an email, which is offering a year’s worth of Dropbox Pro service to try and make up for all the wonderful things you’ve lost.