When a ransomware infects your PC, it is extremely bad news for your personal documents and other files stored on your local disk. What a ransomware does is that it encrypts all of your files using very strong cipher and then demands you a ransom over some obscure online payment channels in exchange of decrypting your files. And if you have installed Dropbox cloud storage client on your PC, then the ransomware might also infect the files stored inside the Dropbox folders. The changes will be automatically synced over to the cloud storage and the files on your Dropbox cloud storage will also be encrypted.
But thanks to the features built inside Dropbox, it is very easy to restore these ransomware encrypted files. When files are deleted or changed, Dropbox does not delete them instantly but keeps the older versions in a recycle bin or trash folder. For the free version of Dropbox, the files stay in this trash folder for a maximum of 30 days, while for the paid version of Dropbox these files can be stored for as long as a whole year.
In order to restore your files, you can login to your Dropbox account in a web browser (preferably on a malware free clean PC) and follow these steps:
- Visit Dropbox web site at https://www.dropbox.com/ and login to your account.
- When the list of files is displayed in the web browser, find and click on the Deleted Files on the left.
- When you see a list of all the deleted files, check the date on which they were deleted and choose the last known good copy of the files – just click on these files.
- It will display some information about the selected deleted file including the file name, file size, file folder etc. Click on the Restore button to restore this file.
- Do this for all the files that were modified by the ransomware.
All the restored files will be automatically synced across all the devices that use some sort of Dropbox client whether it is Windows PC, Mac, Android smartphone or iPhone.