Lost desktop again

1

As a follow-up to my previous post, with the help of the Macs In Law Offices listserv (Richard Hawkins and Michael Scaramella), I discovered that my Desktop and Downloads folders:

(a) had become alias (or sim) links to Dropbox; and

(b) on Dropbox had been moved to “New Location” - which was in fact in Dropbox Backup.

So although I did not (consciously) activate Dropbox Backup, they had been moved there.

As a result of discovering this, I downloaded both backup files to my computer.

  1. I have been able to restore Downloads functionality to Safari.

  2. However, I cannot restore my Desktop (MBP M1 14" running Sonoma 14.6.1).

Google searching has not suggested anyway to restore the Desktop in Sonoma. Is this something anyone has been able to achieve?

TIA

Warwick

2

What do you mean by “restore”? Can’t you just clean out the symlink/alias and re-create the folder?

If not, I’d try booting into recovery mode and doing it manually from the command line.

3

From the Dropbox forums, it appears that you are not alone in losing access to the Desktop.

Unfortunately, this rather scattered thread does not contain any answers. The people who claim to have fixed it did so by having Dropbox support help them. And as @webwalrus suggested, it involves using the Terminal.

If you’re not comfortable with that, I suggest you contact Dropbox tech support to have them walk you through it.

1 Like
4

Thankyou Webwalrus and Margaretamartin.

I guess there is some comfort in knowing it isn’t just me - it never occurred to me there would be a Dropbox forum!

I did find a link buried deep in the thread you identified Margaretamartin about deleting the Backup.

I tried that but, although what has been created is a backup of the Desktop of this computer, Dropbox told me this is the wrong computer and I should try again from the computer from which the backup was originally created! Oh well.

Screwing my courage to the sticking place, I then tried following Webwalrus’ suggestions and with help from Perplexity.ai have deleted the symlinks/aliases and recreated the missing folders (I think).

Leastwise, there are now Desktop and Downloads folders in my User directory and Safari and Brave can download to the Downloads folder.

Thankyou both once again!

5

This is appalling. They’re screwing up the operating system. Cloud storage and the associated utilities are the only thing Dropbox does, and they’ve been doing it a very long time.

I’m setting up a new MacBook now, and I’m going to hold off on installing Dropbox, since the only thing I use it for is syncing Scrivener.