Dropbox Recovery Tools

http://movieos.org/code/dropbox-tools/

A collection of little utilities I'm building as and when I need them to fix things that are wrong with my Dropbox. Dropbox is great and I could not live without it, but this is the Real World and things break.

Just to be clear - you should NOT use these tools without reading and understanding them. They're 30 lines of code each, and full of comments, but they perform potentially destructive changes to your Dropbox folder.

tools

zero_length.py

Recover truncated files.

Usage:

$ python zero_length.py <Dropbox folder>

Something weird happened to a shared dropbox I'm part of, and lots of files became replaced by zero-length versions of themselves. Clearly this is annoying. This script walks through the Dropbox folder, finds zero-length files, and recovers them to the first state in their history where they were not zero length.

bulk_undelete.py

Bulk-undelete files

Usage:

zero_length.py <recovery folder> [<root path>]

eg:

$ python zero_length.py ~/DropboxRecovery/ /SharedThings/

This was my first tool. I managed to delete 18,000 files from the shared work Dropbox folder. Although in theory Dropbox lets you undelete files, in practice you need to do this one at a time. Not going to happen. This script will walk the remote Dropbox repository, and download the most recent version of any file that was deleted in the last 5 days into the recovery folder. If the file already exists in the target folder, it won't be overwritten, so the script will only create new files.

I suggest you recover into a new, empty folder, then copy the files back into dropbox once you're happy that it worked.

instructions

Install requirements.

$ pip install -r requrements.txt

Run script.

# python zero_length.py ~/Dropbox

Eat bacon.