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I was developing some software and using one folder in my Dropbox. At some point, I wanted to share the results with another person, so I shared that folder with him. After a while, I no longer needed to share that info, so I used Windows Explorer to stop sharing that folder. To my horror, I saw that most of the files in the folder had suddenly disappeared, and an error message appeared on the Dropbox taskbar icon. 

As that folder was set to always remain on the hard drive, I did not understand why that was. But even worse, the operation deleted the latest source files from my disk! I panicked and ran to my laptop, disabled the wifi, and recovered the files from the laptop's SSD. Once I felt my code was secure, I returned to my desktop computer. The Dropbox error was a synchronization error, as a file that was opened could not be synchronized. I was viewing an STL file from that folder on MeshLab. Once I closed that app, Dropbox continued to function as normal, and I could see all the deleted files reappear on it.

I suppose the moral of the story is that unusual things can happen when using Dropbox. Why stopping sharing a folder would cause the temporary deletion of its content, to perhaps later re-download it from the cloud, is beyond my comprehension, but while the end result was ok, it stressed me out mid-way. 

Over the years, I have encountered various issues with Dropbox, so I am now moving away from it. While convenient sometimes, you are also at the mercy of the all-mighty cloud services. They began with a simple proposition that, over time, has become too complicated, with numerous side effects that are difficult to anticipate. I am aware of companies that have lost the creation dates of their files due to a folder renaming error. Their support for Linux has been inconsistent. 

If you want to use a Dropbox folder with Google's Antigravity to develop code from different computers, ensure that it is set to always be available on that disk; otherwise, you won't be able to view the chats you had on a different computer.


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