mil00 wrote:
I can't use time machine because I don't own an external hard drive large enough to backup to.
Surely there's a way to create a new downloads folder recognised by the system as a 'downloads' folder in the same way it normally is? Or even a way to reset finder to the preinstalled folders? Seems like a seriously huge oversight if not.
Ive used daisydisk for years with no issues, the only difference this time is that Dropbox seems to have intrinsically linked itself to my downloads folder and so by deleting residual Dropbox files from my computer it's taken the downloads folder with it, which if anything is a fault of Dropbox.
That seems odd because external drives are so inexpensive nowadays. I have at least two external drives that I use for Time Machine backups and another for "clone" backups, for each computer. (These also make backups of all the Dropbox files as they were at the time of each backup.)
I use Dropbox, and have also used DaisyDisk to inventory a drive (but would never use it to "clean" or delete files from a computer!), and they each do the things that the user configures or tells them to do. I don't even know how to "link" the Downloads folder to something in Dropbox, although I suppose you could have moved the downloads folder into Dropbox and somehow deleted the entire folder from there. Not sure why you are blaming Dropbox for this. When a file or folder is deleted from Dropbox, it warns the user first fairly explicitly that this step will remove the file/folder from all devices on the Dropbox account, and requests a confirmation that you really want to do this.
In any case, what happened has happened, have a look at this:
https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/security/missing-reappearing-corrupted-files
It explains how you can recover files and even entire folders from Dropbox after you have deleted them. I believe you have at least 30 days to do this.
Also: check your Trash to make sure the lost folder is still not there.
Lastly: there are various "Data Recovery" tools available, they are not free. If your Mac has not been used much since the deletion, they can sometimes recover a deleted file or folder. I think this tends to work best on mechanical (spinning) drives, not as well on SSDs. In any case, most allow you to run them first in a trial mode to see if it can find the deleted folder first, before you buy the utility. But the folder can only be restored with the paid up version, typically.
