Restoring a deleted file

Work Culture

Tip of the week: How to go back in time

By

Published on November 14, 2014

Collaboration is a great way for teams to bring big ideas to life. But sometimes it can be tough to reconcile everyone's different opinions and working styles. Projects change direction and files get deleted — sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally. Luckily, if your work is stored in Dropbox, it's easy to turn back the clock and recover deleted files or restore previous versions. Say you're working on a big project that's gone through several rounds of revisions over the past month, and you're responsible for the main project file. Unfortunately, this important presentation is starting to look like a few too many cooks have been in the kitchen. The team decides unanimously that they liked it better the way it was in the beginning. Now you have to spend hours reverse-engineering the presentation to get it back to its former state... right? Wrong! Instead of clearing your schedule to redo all that work, you can easily go back to a previous version of the file. Just right-click the file in your Dropbox desktop app and select View Previous Versions. You'll be taken to the Dropbox website, where you can select which version you'd like to revert to (you can also start this process directly from the Dropbox website). And what about if you delete a file then change your mind — or if a coworker accidentally deletes a file from a shared folder? We've got you covered there, too. Dropbox for Business accounts have unlimited version history, so we hold on to every single deleted file and previous version case you need something again — just use the Dropbox website to view all your deleted files and restore as many as you'd like. You can even restore entire groups of files at once using the events log, or by contacting support. To learn how to restore previous versions and deleted files, visit our User Guide.