Dropbox Rewind

What is Dropbox Rewind? Well, if you go to our help center article page, you can visit help.dropbox.com and search for "Dropbox Rewind" or any other functionality you want to learn more about. But today, we'll specifically be talking about Dropbox Rewind.

Basically, what it will do is allow you to undo a large number of changes. There are various steps you need to take to do this, which I'll show you in a brief moment. Just remember that if you've deleted a file, you can check your deleted files page within Dropbox.com on the web. If you want to change a single file to a previous version after making an edit to it, you can click on the version history of that file.

If you visit this page in the help center article, it will provide more details about what Dropbox Rewind can do. It can rewind file edits, renames, additions, deletions, actions taken in shared folders, including those owned by others, and actions taken in Dropbox Business team folders that you're a member of and have added access to. However, it will not undo changes made earlier than your account version's history.

For example, if you have a 180-day history, which is typically what Dropbox Business teams have, it won't undo changes made beyond that. If you prefer a longer version history, speak to one of your account managers about extended version history, an add-on that provides ten years of version history on file changes.

Dropbox Rewind also won't undo permanently deleted files, changes made to paper documents, changes to files or folders owned by other teams, file history, or file or folder membership changes. If you're removed from a shared folder, rewinding won't add you back to that folder.

Now, let's take a quick look at what Dropbox Rewind looks like. Here is a shared folder with some material in it. Let's pretend that someone deleted this information by mistake. I'm going to delete this content here, which contains eight items. Once all of that information has been deleted, I can click on the ellipses (...) here. Then, if I go to "Show deleted files," it will display those deleted files.

Instead of having to go through each deleted file one by one, I can click back to the folder and access the "Rewind" functionality. By clicking on "Rewind this folder," a right-hand rail appears, asking me if I want to find an earlier version of a file or recover a deleted file. If I choose "Try Rewind" instead, it will look for specific actions that have occurred.

For instance, today there is an action. By clicking on "Today," it zooms in on the specific day and shows that there were deleted files at 3:37. I can choose which state I want to revert to, all the way back to the original file. After selecting the desired state, I click "Continue," and it proceeds to rewind to the selected time. This will work in the background until all the files are reinstated.

This functionality can save you from having to contact our help desk for major file changes, allowing end users to correct accidental mistakes or changes made by teammates. Dropbox Rewind provides a quick way to rewind a specific folder to a specific point in time.