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Disappearing files

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Krystin Miller

We have 3 people who collaborate on the same folders and files using their own Box account logins. We all utilize Box Drive and have been using Box generally for years. Recently, we have noticed that files are disappearing. Yesterday, I worked on 2 documents and saved them. My boss then opened those same documents to review and revise them. When he was done, those documents disappeared on my end. I could not locate them on my computer or online. They just vanished. Today, I was able to find those documents still on his computer in the same place I expected them to be. Once I had him rename the files, they magically reappeared online and on my computer. Why is renaming them a fix? I am simply changing the date within the file name. There were no special characters that may have caused an issue either. How do we make sure this doesn't keep happening? It is causing quite an issue for us as we all work remotely and need to depend on Box to do its job.

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4 comments

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  • Official comment
    France

    Hi Krystin, 

    Welcome to the Box Community, I'm happy to help!

    This sounds like a case with an Unsupported name in Box Drive.

    Some operating systems do not support item names containing some special characters. If you attempt to save files or folders names containing these characters, Box Drive prompts you to rename the item using the underscore character.

    • Box OS-independent restrictions: Box does not support '/' and '\' anywhere in a file or folder name or whitespaces at the beginning or end of a file or folder name.
    • Windows OS restrictions:
      • < (less than)
      • > (greater than)
      • : (colon)
      • " (double quote)
      • / (forward slash)
      • \ (backslash)
      • | (vertical bar or pipe)
      • ? (question mark)
      • * (asterisk)
      • If Windows does not support certain characters in file names, Box marks them as problem files. See the list of Windows file name restrictions. Windows file name restrictions also shown below:
      • Windows does not support folder names that end with a . (period) character.
    • Mac OS restrictions:
      • Box does not support opening spaces.
      • Box does not recognize Mac’s character conversion in file names (for example, Mac changes any occurrence of / to : in file names).
      • If Mac does not support certain characters in file names, Box marks them as problem files. Contact Apple support for recommendations on renaming files, folders, or disks.

    If the item on Box has an unsupported name, rename the item on Box and Box Drive will re-process the download. If the local file has an unsupported name, you really need to rename the file locally to sync it to Box.

    Hope this information helps. If you have any questions, please let us know and we will do our best to help!

    Best,

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  • Krystin Miller

    Thank you for your reply. I understand the issue with special characters, spaces, etc. However, there were no unsupportive characters in these file names. For example, our files were named something like 2022-04-10 Application.pdf. More importantly, the files were previously listed in Box Drive for all to access so it had no issue syncing before. The problem seems to happen when someone opens, edits, and then resaves the file (without editing the file name). When we edited the file name in order to fix the missing files, we simply changed the numbers in the date portion. For example, it went from 2022-04-10 Application.pdf. to 2022-04-11 Application.pdf. There must be another explanation since the unsupportive character problem does not fit here. Also, since moving from Box Sync to Box Drive, we are no longer able to preview files in Finder which is a huge drawback. I really hope that will be addressed. 

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  • Claes Asker

    I can confirm the issue. It has been an issue for at leased six month, probably longer. It has happed to my colleagues and me several time. Someone opens a shared files i Box Drive, makes changes and saves it. The file disappears for the other people both in Drive and online. A work around we have used is that the person who can see the file, duplicates it, and magically both files are visible to everybody, both the original and the copy. It has been MS office files and we use both MacOS and Windows.  

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  • Pamela Anderson

    This is happening to us as well. Please advise on any fixes. 

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