In January 2017, Dropbox restored years-old supposedly deleted files and folders in user accounts. In one example, a user reported that folders from 2011 and 2012 returned. In explaining the issue, a Dropbox employee wrote on its forum that "A bug was preventing some files and folders from being fully deleted off our servers, even after users had deleted them from their Dropbox accounts. 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. Typically, we permanently remove files and folders from our servers within 60 days of a user deleting them. However, the deleted files and folders impacted by this bug had metadata inconsistencies. So we quarantined and excluded them from the permanent deletion process until the metadata could be fixed". [ 35 ] [ 36 ]