The developers of Dropbox have fixed a bug that caused files that were deleted many years ago to be restored in user accounts. Now users are allowed to remove the "Risen from the dead" files for the second time. The company promises that they will never appear again.

Some security experts have long suspected that when deleting files on Dropbox, they are not deleted, but are stored on the hosting - as is the case with supposedly “deleted” information on Facebook . They say that when "deleting" the file is only marked as deleted (the corresponding flag is set). It disappears from the account, but continues to be stored on the server just in case.
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Dropbox assures that it is not.

According to the Dropbox policy, the company permanently deletes files 60 days after the user clicks the delete button. Those miracles that have been happening lately are supposedly just a “bug.”

In the last couple of weeks, some users began to report that previously deleted files and folders began to appear in their accounts. It caused bewilderment in people. The files were usually very old, as if they had originated from nowhere.

There have been several discussions in technical support forums. They were later combined into one thread . In some cases, folders appeared in the accounts, deleted as much in 2009, in other cases - more recent.

“I have the same problem - several different folders with old files of 2009-2011, deleted a few years ago, suddenly appeared in one day,” writes one of the victims. “And I definitely didn’t connect to the old computer.” The user explains that the files could not be synchronized with the old PC, where there were copies.

“I deleted these files over six years ago,” wrote another. “The devices where they were stored have long been thrown away.”

Another user says that after seeing the new file folders in the account, he changed the password for the account and interrupted all connections with the server - he thought that his account was hacked.

After numerous complaints from users, on January 19, 2017, representatives of Dropbox acknowledged the problem and announced the release of the patch. The company explained that the reason for the bug that did not allow some files and folders to completely leave the servers, even when users deleted them from Dropbox accounts: “By fixing this bug, we accidentally restored these files and folders in user accounts. It was our mistake; the reason is not the intervention of a third party, and you are not hacked, ”wrote one of the developers.

That is, the company really kept the formally “deleted” files on its servers for many years - apparently, did not notice a few terabytes of unnecessary data.

True, this does not apply to all files. The deleted and then restored files and folders in this case had “inconsistency of metadata”. As explained by Dropbox, due to inconsistency of metadata, these specific files and folders were quarantined, excluded from the process of deleting files, until the metadata is corrected.

“During this time, no one had access to your files or folders and no other files are exposed to the bug,” says Dropbox. The bug is fixed, and the “newly born” files and folders will not affect the disk quota of users.

Bogus deletion of information - the normal behavior of some "cloud" companies and social networks. For example, Facebook also does not delete private messages, photos and other information that hit the server, if the user then decided to remove it from his account (as he believes, “delete”).

Your information in the cloud is not your information.

Personal information about the user is a valuable asset that the company owns, so no one wants to delete it for free. Remember the history of law student Max Schrems? He demanded from Facebook to send a CD with all personal data collected on him for three years of activity on the site.

The guy received a PDF document disc of more than 1200 pages, all the information in the file was divided into 57 categories (work, education, friends, political views, hobbies, photos, etc.). As he said, even the KGB did not have such a complete file on citizens.

But the most surprising thing is that, among other things, the sent file contained deleted messages, chat sessions, names of former friends and other data marked “ deleted”: true .

One can hardly suspect the company Dropbox in cunning. It is really difficult for her to store absolutely all deleted information for many years. Here we are talking about large amounts of data. It is known that file hosting sites use all sorts of tricks to at least slightly optimize disk space and get rid of unnecessary information. This is for them direct financial damage.

But "deleting" a file from a cloud hosting, you can never be 100% sure that it is really deleted. I wonder how many companies still have such "bugs".