National Association of Writers and Groups (development site – not for public use – official site: www.nawg.co.uk)

Several staff, including the reporter of this issue, have witnessed data loss when making changes to the membership spreadsheet.

More specifically, data changes are being lost, and data reversions are being observed.

Symptoms (anecdotal)

1. A person downloads the latest membership workbook from Dropbox.
2. They make changes to their local copy, such as adding new members, editing existing ones, "removing"^† old ones.
3. The edited workbook is uploaded to Dropbox^‡.
4. The workbook is later examined^*. The recent changes have been lost^#.

Notes:

At the point of this issue being reported, it was unclear whether:

• Software problems are to blame,
• Human error is involved,
• Both.

As there's a lack of concrete evidence, at least none that can be witnessed in a reproducible way, please report any instances, stating where possible:

• The exact steps you took,
• What you expected to happen,
• What actually happened.

Theory

One possible theory is that these problems occur when more than one person is making changes during the same approximate period of time.

Essentially a "leap frog" issue, due to the timing of the steps taken, as hopefully the diagram below demonstrates.

As yet, there is no proof nor disproof of this, so it remains a working theory.

[31-Mar-2026 Kevin] We've discovered that there are problems with using the Dropbox built-in spreadsheet viewer/editor. Among other possible issues are:

• Viewing counts as editing, leading to unnecessary file revisions.
• Changing the filters causes edits to be made.
• "Empty" rows are added, causing the file size to increase massively, e.g. from ~200 KB to ~3 MB.
• Due to the above, the risk of concurrent editing is greatly increased, merely by looking at the file.