You could probably renew your subscription for a month and get access. They're very slow to actually disable or delete anything, for this reason.
This is why we verify this kind of job.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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This. I’m an M365 tenant admin at my org (among other bullshit hats I’m told to put on) and there are several stages of retention of data. 3 stages or recycling bin. 90 day retention policies each by default.
Your stuff is still there! I have a good feeling about it.
Please tell me you have proper backups for your next cloud instance
Look, I'm not going to lie to you.
After yoloing it for years, I finally deployed an offaite backup this month. I also host on Nextcloud (at my house). While I do have a local disk backing up my Nextcloud install, I didn't have any backups of the external media hosting my photos.
Finally, I ordered a 10TB external drive and plugged it into a raspberry pi I had sitting around. Using wireguard and restic, I now have an offsite backup at a friend's house!
So you're going to start backing it up immediately then right? Right?!?!?
If anything, just get some external drives or something lol. Depending on how much space you are using, you can also look at hetzner. They have storage boxes that are relatively cheap for cloud backups.
You could also use OneDrive or Google, just make sure you encrypt everything. This way they don't actually have any of your data. It's just for backups.
I have also been using storj with truenas. You get a discount this way, but storj just introduced new pricing, so I don't know how that impacts the discount or not
I cancelled my Dropbox subscription like over 5 years ago, with about 1TB of data in there. They're still sending me emails saying they're going to delete my data but they haven't yet lol. I'm not using it but it's funny to see they still have it all.
Yeah, your data is taken hostage. When cancelling the subscription it’s a good idea to delete everything manually before the account expires. Even if you can’t guarantee Dropbox haven’t just flagged the files as deleted, it signals intention. I did this when migrating to pCloud and haven’t received any reminders from Dropbox.
I'm sorry for your loss.
You got two options. Both suck.
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Call support. Have fun. I'd rather rip out my eyeballs in this scenario because you're not a paying customer. You will get the shit-tier service, will likely be hung up on, and reexplain the situation to 3+ individuals over the course of 4 hours and ultimately get nothing done.
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Resubscribe. Finish the job. The odds of your accounts db being wiped are kinda slim. Sucks because you do what you explicitly sought to avoid: pay Microsoft.
I coughed up the $7 for an extra month. it all seems to be there.
Good to hear. Now buy an external HDD or a device of your choice and copy the files there and store it somewhere safe. One backup is no backup.
"Safe" meaning somewhere it won't be destroyed by fire, flood, hurricane, etc. that destroys the primary copy.
Glad to hear. Lesson learned: The panic you felt sucked. It was thankfully $7 to resolve. Next time it might not be.
Back up your stuff 3 times, in at least two places. 🙂
That's great you're data was there. You had to pay the $7 but have benefited from a 2-1-1 backup strategy here.
Congratulations.
I once sat in the queue for MS support for 6 hours before I gave up, and it was for a business related issue.
Fun fact, they stop playing music after 3 hours.