Dive Brief:

• Dropbox accidently restored old files users thought they had deleted, raising concerns that a hack had potentially occurred at the file sharing company. Some users said the deleted files reappeared years after they had deleted them. 

• The company attributed the problem to a bug that prevented some files from being deleted from their servers completely.

• According to a Dropbox employee dubbed Ross S. who responded to customer concerns on the Dropbox forum, "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."

Dive Insight:

In an age of heightened privacy concerns, no user wants the files they thought were permanently deleted coming back to life. And companies that assure a user's privacy is maintained don't want to be caught in a compromising situation. 

According to Dropbox’s privacy policy, the company permanently erases data from its servers 60 days after a customer deletes them. But in this case, the bug apparently corrupted the metadata of some files, causing them to be "quarantined" instead of deleted.

Once the bug was fixed, the files were mistakenly restored rather than deleted, according to Dropbox.

There was no comment about why it’s taken Dropbox so long to fix the bug, which has apparently been around for quite some time. Several Dropbox users have said folders they deleted as far back as 2009 reappeared on their devices.