When something has been removed, it should at least be gone. So when files were deleted, they should be "deleted." However, this is rarely the case, and the same goes to Dropbox.
In its attempt to fix a bug, the cloud storage service Dropbox accidentally restored years-old "deleted" files for some customer accounts. Dropbox keeps deleted files for 30 days for basic users and pro accounts. Or up to a year for pro accounts that have signed up for Dropbox’s Extended Version History. But in this case, it was revealed that the company actually retained them for as long as 8 years.
Something went wrong, in this case, that prevented Dropbox from doing its advertised process.
A Dropbox employee identified only as Ross S., was responding to complaints posted to the company Help Center forum. At first, the reported bug was said to make some files to have "metadata inconsistencies."
The bug was corrupting the metadata of the files, making deleted files to be quarantined rather than deleted. So even if the users had deleted them from their Dropbox account, some of the files and folders couldn't be fully deleted from the servers.
The engineers at the company "quarantined and excluded" those faulty files from being queued for deletion until they could fix the problem. But when the engineers were attempting to fix the problem, the files that were mistakenly marked to be restored rather than deleted, were "inadvertently" resurrected from the dead, restoring them to the respective owners' account.
"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."
Bug fixing is something that should be done. In terms of the software world, it's a process that can be either easy or troublesome. But either can be problematic. In an attempt to squash one bug, someone can surface even more bugs.
Furthermore, when a bug is fixed in a way that users don't expect, the process can also confuse them.
Those zombie files were like zombies that couldn't be deleted. When users tried to delete those resurrected zombie files, they kept coming back.
After realizing this problem, and this mistake, the company then promised to sweep those zombie files and put an end to them for good. Dropbox implemented a fix that would permanently delete those restored and couldn't be deleted files.
"The fix will only impact the inadvertently restored files and folders. If you have edited the files or folders - by moving them or updating the content inside - they will stay in your Dropbox," said Ross. "You can still manually delete these files and folders if you don’t want them."
While finding and squashing bugs are common from time to time, Dropbox's problem draws attention to a potential privacy problem.