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How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795
- namank 14y agoWOAH! This might be happening to me in about two weeks!
- rocky1138 14y agoCome up with a battle plan and share it with HN if it works, please.
- areohbe 14y agoI had an identical experience. I submitted a flurry of customer service tickets without a response. I was damn near ready to walk down to their office since they don't provide any type 1-800 number. Finally, I got a response from a customer support rep named Todd who explained to me that my account had been deleted when I was removed from the Team. Fortunately, he was able to restore my account and I weaseled an extra 5GB of month for the trouble. Quite the scare.
- rdl 14y agoI'd be really surprised if Dropbox didn't have a way to revert this (and to punish the Dropbox for Teams account creator, if identifiable).
- DanBC 14y agoRevert this how? Ann has an individual account. She joins a team. She leaves the team, and Bob (the team account owner) revokes her access. Dropbox deletes all her accounts. What can dropbox do here; set Ann back as a member of that team? Bob (paying a lot of money) is not happy with that.
- john-n 14y agoNo, they just have to remove anns access to any team based information, same as she was prior to joining?
- justinschuh 14y agoHow do you do that? Once she joins the team, you have no way of knowing if something Ann created or modified belongs to the team or to her. This is the classic problem with "taint checking." Once you mix data across boundaries you have to assume it's tainted. I agree it's a crappy situation, but I can't see what Dropbox should change, other than make it very clear how this feature works to future customers. As a one-time thing, they could maybe get a PR win by helping this guy recover his data (if possible). However, that's not scalable, or a precedent they'd want to continue forward.
- nhangen 14y agoThey can clearly delineate between team and personal accounts, force team storage to certain directories, and/or not allow users to manage team/personal accounts with the same login.
- justinschuh 14y agoI was specifically responding to the previous comment, to explain why Dropbox can't simply revoke access to team storage files at this point (because they can't guarantee what constitutes team data). However, I'm in agreement with you that Dropbox could introduce new features to prevent this situation from happening in the first place, and had already noted as much in a different comment.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 14y agoDropbox doesn't delete the files, so none of this matters. They're only deleting the account, which revokes nothing but causes lots of problems. There is nothing hard to fix. Just switch it back to personal quota.
- revelation 14y agoThat makes no sense at all.
- Flimm 14y agoDropbox could delete all data shared with the team from Ann's account. Then it could set Ann's account to read-only access until Ann deletes enough data to meet the new maximum size limit.
- Yoni1 14y agoOP here - (in my story) the Teams account creator did not do this out of cruelty, they just didn't know this is what Dropbox does. I imagine very few people realize that this is how it works. What should've happened is this: revoke my access to the team folder and downgrade my account back to Free. (Then, annoy me and refuse to sync until I go down to 2GB of usage.) That would be good design.
- nr0mx 14y agoReading the Dropbox help page, it seems like the situation might be worse if you were a paying customer: "If you convert your existing account to Teams, the balance you have remaining on your Pro subscription will be credited to the Teams subscription.". The language is pretty clear that an individual to Teams conversion is final, irrevocable. That in itself is okay, but then the conversion mail should have come with big, red warning notices; not the bland email you seem to have received.
- gregpilling 14y agoIf you find a way around this, please post the link. I have the problem from the team side. I don't want to do any damage to anyone, but I don't want to share anymore either.
- Wintamute 14y agoIn the meantime you should make sure that people you're sharing Teams with create a fresh free Dropbox account for that purpose, not their personal one. If they really need some folders on their personal account too I guess they could share a folder or two with their personal account?
- nr0mx 14y agoI can't imagine Dropbox can punish the Teams account creator for what amounts to their failure to educate users on the implication of the action. The victim does have to accept the invitation for this to work, so any unintended consequence of their action is due to lack of knowledge.
- matthuggins 14y agoMirror? Getting a Google Drive error: "The app is currently unreachable."
- keithpeter 14y agoSo when joining a startup (or anything else) that uses Dropbox for Teams, you make a new account just for that project? Perhaps startups (and other entities) that require dropbox membership might make that suggestion?
- Yoni1 14y agoI don't think making a new account just for your Teams access is very convenient. The desktop application is only associated with 1 account at a time. So (until Dropbox changes something) there does not seem to be a good solution to your question.
- geofft 14y agoHave your startup get you a separate computer. Not mixing work and personal life extends to not doing work development on your personal machine or vice versa.
- Yoni1 14y agoThat's good personal advice - but it's not really a solution to the problem for everyone.
- justinschuh 14y agoIt's really the only solution if you want to maintain some degree of personal privacy, and don't want to incur all your employer's liability on your personal account (and vice versa).
- kamjam 14y agoThat's largely going to depend on where you live and the laws of that place. Remember, it's a worldwide market these days!
- keithpeter 14y agoDual boot? e.g. Windows/Corporate style Linux for work and Ubuntu/MacOS for home?
- chayesfss 14y agoIs it possible to see what clients use this service like you can with other services (dropbox.com/company or whatever)
- xoail 14y agoI can imagine why it is so hard to roll back to your old account once you leave a team. It might be best for companies to advise their employees to create separate dropbox account before joining a team.
- barredo 14y agoIt may be due to key encryption methods?
- xoail 14y agoYes, plus there is no distinction between your personal account and team's account once they are merged.
- josh2600 14y agoNormally I'd agree with you, but considering Dropbox uses the same private key for all storage... I don't know. https://www.dropbox.com/help/28/en https://www.dropbox.com/help/28/en
- Yoni1 14y agoIf it's hard it's due to bad design. It could've been possible.
- sltkr 14y agoBut good design is hard too.
- mblake 14y agoBad design most likely. Looking more carefully at the link in the initial email they sent you: 'confirm_migrate?'. This almost gives it away.
- Yoni1 14y agoI didn't even notice that until now, and definitely not when I originally clicked the link :)
- lucian1900 14y agoIf it's not possible to un-entangle accounts, then Dropbox needs to support being logged in to several accounts, much like Google does. Also, to not delete user's data.
- 8ig8 14y agoI assume this would work against their model of giving away limited free space. With multiple account access, a user could sign up with multiple email addresses and essentially get unlimited storage for free.
- cstejerean 14y agoThey could restrict multiple account functionality to paid accounts only.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoThat's trivial to solve. Only allow a single free account to be signed into. Multiple accounts are required to be team accounts.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y agoAt the risk of stating the obvious, that invitation email ought to be a bit more informative. Maybe, there ought to be an option to create a new account for use with that team.
- Oompa 14y agoWhat's sad is that the Dropbox desktop client doesn't support multiple accounts easily, so then you might as well use a different service, so you can have 2 clients installed that sync automatically.
- niggler 14y agoThis is why I never trust services like Dropbox. It's painful to maintain backups manually but at least I can sleep well at night knowing that the only points of failure are within my control EDIT: because I realize its not completely obvious, I keep multiple backups with my own servers sitting in different data centers. I don't see how you could trust any external service to store data.
- SquareWheel 14y agoAre the backups local? You can't prevent against a flood, fire, or theft. Are the backups off-site? You can't protect against a company going bankrupt, somebody cutting the wrong wire, or your ISP farting. Backups should be both local and off-site. Which is what Dropbox provides, actually.
- kamjam 14y agobut at least I can sleep well at night knowing that the only points of failure are within my control Hahaha, when he said that I immediately thought I'd like to see him control flood, fire, theft or "other acts of god". Like you say, backups need to be local and off-site. No single point of failure, that is the key!
- niggler 14y agoThe thing which would take out all of my backups is if the entire country was flooded or if there were a coordinated attack on all places (it's spread out throughout the country)
- niggler 14y agoI have four backups, one of which is local on a hard drive in my office, one on tapes at my house, and two sitting in drives in separate data centers. And yes driving to the data centers is a pain :/ Regardless of the level of replication it provides, it lulls you into a false sense of security (which is probably just as bad as not having backups in the first place)
- natural219 14y agoThis seems like an issue best resolved through Dropbox support, not through HN Soapbox support. Edit: My main point is that I come here to read Hacker News, not Some Other Guy's Support Problems. Treating every dropped use case as a public relations crisis is just an exercise in getting yourself worked up for no reason. If this is a real issue that affects multiple, real users, then I'm sure Dropbox will do something about it. For now, I think it's reasonable to treat it as an oversight until we have a response from Dropbox or more information. Unless, of course, you're the type of person that just likes to get pissed off at companies. In that case, I should probably find another community to read "hacker news".
- 8ig8 14y agoSpecifically, yes, but big picture, I think the interest here is that so-called cloud storage is not a silver bullet. There are real issues, problems that need solving (opportunities) and people need to be careful.
- nr0mx 14y agoThe OP says he did that: "I tried contacting Dropbox on twitter and using their site’s support contact form, and they have not yet gotten back to me."
- natural219 14y agoThere is a place for public notices of foul play by companies, certainly. Normally, though, those accounts garner my sympathy when they explain the full support story and get snubbed by a represenative, usually after at least some waiting. Not saying that the OP didn't wait plenty of time, but I would find his complaint more compelling if he would have mentioned how long ago he contacted them.
- danso 14y ago> There is a place for public notices of foul play by companies, certainly. Why does there have to be foul play involved? Security holes largely exist because of negligence. As do poorly-implemented features. Not everything that is harmful is a result of evil manifesting itself.
- justinschuh 14y agoIntermingling personal and work accounts is almost always a bad idea. I've seen colleagues get their personal accounts subpoenaed, have a firing result in loss of primary email/cell, or have really awkward communications show up in an IT audit. The overhead of maintaining separate accounts is very small (multi-profile browser, multi-account smartphone, etc.), and more than worth it given the liabilities. Beyond that, I think it's just a lot healthier to know where the boundaries between your work and personal life are.
- pearkes 14y agoI recently bought a second laptop for home, even though it was common at the company I work for to use your computer for work and pleasure. Under California employment law, an employer can argue that they own anything created on company machines[1]. If you work on side projects, I think it's a worthy investment. [1] http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-at-a-company-do-they-have-intellectual-property-rights-to-the-st/20126#20126 http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...
- justinschuh 14y agoDefinitely. I'm comfortable using my employer-provided laptop to keep tabs on my personal email (and use multi-profile to keep it separate). However, if I was doing any side work at all I would keep it entirely off of my employer's systems and outside work hours, because my baseline assumption is that it belongs to your employer if you produced it with their resources or on their time.
- jevinskie 14y agoCareful! I believe they can still claim any work that is related to the company's field. Or is that just something that is commonly included in employment contracts?
- obviouslygreen 14y agoI recall this being present in IT contracts at least ten years ago, but some time around then people figured it out and started insisting on removing that section... though I actually personally saw something like this for the first time just last week. Fortunately, a client had just sent me the wrong form, but there's no way I would have signed it. It's just a matter of carefully reading contracts and making sure you know what you're getting yourself into.
- smellyfinger 14y agoWould you also be able to get all of your enemies files? or would your enemy have to share all his folders with the team?
- Yoni1 14y agoAs far as I know you can't get anyone's files if they don't explicitly share them (or put them in the Public or team folder).
- Yoni1 14y agoCorrection: It appears I'm wrong and you're right.
- adammulligan 14y agoI believe with their new ToS admins can access any team member's files[1] [1] https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/39bd6ae2-a0b6-41a9-87a4-621c9edf9f90/391970b0b9683207a786f3e2f8c1afea https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/39bd6ae2-a0b6-41a9-87a4...
- kmfrk 14y agoPaging Google and Microsoft. Now's as good a time as any to promote your cloud storage services and help a guy out.
- aspir 14y agoThis very reason is actually why my company is migrating to Box. No one I work with is the type to jump ship on a company just for one feature, but this is a major liability. I'll still keep DB for my personal use, but my company had ~30 TB of Dropbox storage at the time. Our account is a blip on their revenue radar, but if Dropbox wants to become a a truly monumental company, they'll need to do something to fix this. Being small business friendly isn't the same as "Enterprise friendly," but Dropbox is neither at this point.
- sumitngupta 14y agoI've actually been through this twice now (its currently disabled from leaving the second company's Team account, I should have known better but I thought they would have "fixed" the issue by now). First time around they just needed my the guy at my last company to approve it being re-enabled (not sure why)... and waiting for that whole flow to start up again for this second time. I should have known better this time :( I really just don't get the reasoning behind the feature being implemented this way. I would imagine Dropbox would want to discourage signing up for multiple accounts just cause ones personal and one's work.
- Wintamute 14y agoI guess its because by joining a Team you're being inducted into an "organisation" and then have access to all their private data. It'd be no good if every time somebody left a Team (say a freelancer) they take a copy of the organisations data with them. I'd imagine a Team account's data is encrypted too, so there's no way to decrypt it without an account that authenticates as a member of said Team ...
- sumitngupta 14y agoDoesn't really work that way though cause I could just copy everything outside of my dropbox account on my personal machine. What I had expected to happen is all the Team priv's like a bigger size limit to be removed (I already had 50gigs before though.. curious if I'll get that back or have to repay) and the shared folders to magically disappear from along side all my personal folders. It really wasn't a huge deal this time around as I learned now to store all my password files and stuff through DB anymore as that boned me pretty hard the last time around.
- Wintamute 14y agoAgreed, point taken.
- mblake 14y agoI strongly recommend CrashPlan for backups. They may not be marketing aggressively like Dropbox, nor will you find them mentioned N times a day on HN/similar venues, but they provide a damn good product/service. You will not have such issues with them.
- icebraining 14y agoSyncing and backups solve different problems, and Crashplan is not an alternative to Dropbox.
- josso 14y agoHad the exact same situation last year. Was interning at a startup for a couple of weeks. I joined their Team-DropBox and some time after leaving the startup, they (logically) revoked my access without either of us knowing what it would result in. After an email back and forth with both the DropBox-Team-support and the startup, I got my account back in the exact same state as it was in, when my account got revoked. I still had all of the startups stuff but it no longer synced. As I was many GB over the limit of my free DropBox-account I deleted all the files belonging to the startup (which of course is the right thing to do). I'm glad this is getting some attention, because it is clearly not working very well as it is right now. Hopefully DropBox will make the user experience better.
- adammulligan 14y agoWe had this happen over the summer to someone that left and were removed from the team. It was resolved by contacting Dropbox support, so I'm not sure why you've not had luck with that but then it is the holiday period. Dropbox's recent changes to how Teams Admins can manage connected accounts (which in my opinion are a bit excessive) might help with this process. Their ToS explains these changes but an email they sent round in October explains it better: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/39bd6ae2-a0b6-41a9-87a4-621c9edf9f90/391970b0b9683207a786f3e2f8c1afea https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/39bd6ae2-a0b6-41a9-87a4...
- uptown 14y agoIf I were Dropbox, and designing this feature, I'd have created two folders inside the master Dropbox folder. "Personal" and "Teams" then inside the "Teams" folder, I'd have created a folder for each team a person is invited to join. I realize that structure wasn't in-place when Dropbox was first created, complicating the matter - but it seems like it would have provided the cleanest way to delineate what files and access would be revoked when a user is removed from a team.
- businessleads 14y agoYes. Hopefully someone from the team reads this and forwards it onward with the subject header: "Implement this now [blocker]"
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- aroberge 14y agoThis is a great idea. I can see the marketing too: Even if you cancel your paid account, you will always keep you (x) GB for personal use free.
- zaidf 14y agoConsidering huge number of users will never use the Teams folder, it seems like an additional click for no good reason for most users.
- codygman 14y agoOnly display the teams folder if the user is a member of one or more teams... easy fix.
- zaidf 14y agoLet's say I start with a Personal account. I use it for a few weeks. In this time, you are saying there won't be a Personal folder, right? So in a few weeks I am added to a Team. The Teams and Personal folders appear. Does this mean all the file paths for files inside my Personal folder change to /Personal/<prior path>?
- benjlang 14y agoYoni - what's your Twitter handle? Interested to see first hand what Dropbox responded.
- benjlang 14y agoYoni - what's your Twitter handle? Interested to see first hand what Dropbox responded.
- j45 14y agoThis should be better communicated when upgrading your account to join a team. Individuals place a lot of blind trust in cloud providers with their life's data. This would be completely unacceptable, ever to risk my data in any way and I'm a little surprised Dropbox doesn't realize they don't have a business without trust that their data will always be ok.
- rawb92 14y agoalmost $800 to slightly inconvience them isn't worth it, now if it deleted every single file of theirs then I have a few people I would do this to! It does seem silly that they can't simply remove you from a team without deleting your account, I can't think of anything that would stop them from being able to do that other than not having the time or motivation to implement the feature.
- edanm 14y agoAnother Dropbox horror story: My colleague lost most of his Dropbox folder last week, and wasn't able to recover everything. What happened: he had Dropbox synced to 2 computers, but one of them hadn't been used in a while. He turned on the old computer, and apparently, for some reason, Dropbox decided that the fact that many files weren't there was because they were deleted. Of course, the files weren't there because they hadn't been synced yet! So Dropbox decided, when the old computer was turned on, to delete 10s of thousands of files that were in my colleague's account. He reached out to them to help restore. It took several days (this happened on a weekend), but they did eventually restore it. Unfortunately, since it was difficult for them to pinpoint exactly what was the start of the event, some files were not recovered (I'm not sure the exact reason this was difficult to do). I love Dropbox [1], but this was a serious blow to how much I trust them with my files. [1] Just look at my comment history to see - I've raved about them several times on HN.
- pc86 14y agoWhile I feel for your colleague, I have to wonder why he didn't have a backup if these files were important enough to spend several days trying to get them back.[1] [1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html
- mikeash 14y agoPeople frequently confuse file syncing facilities with backup facilities, and I don't think Dropbox does much to clarify which one they are. Although, I thought Dropbox kept a history on each file going back a month.....
- drivers99 14y agoShoot. I've been thinking of dropbox as my backup. Now I wonder what would qualify as backup considering I want it to be automated and preferably not require me to write to media like DVDs. (Time Machine seems to be doing the trick on the Mac side, although... having all the backup media connected to the machine it's backing up means it's susceptible to simultaneous deletion, as well not being offsite means it is susceptible to theft/fire.) On the Windows side, I've been backing up just "important" files with dropbox, which has the benefit of being offsite and automated. I once used Mozy, but when I needed to do a restore they had problems generating a recovery image for me. I think they eventually got access to all the files after a few days. That wasn't reassuring.
- lightcatcher 14y agoI had the exact same issues as the OP (interned at a startup and used personal Dropbox account for Dropbox for teams), but I was aware of the potential issue upon leaving the Dropbox for Teams account and emailed Dropbox support and everything worked out fine.
- tapsboy 14y agoWhy has dropbox not considered a github style context changing feature till now. I am surprised.
- sean_lynch 14y agoHey guys - Dropbox product manager here, tl;dr: The scenario described by the OP is now less likely to occur. Since October, individual Dropbox users are encouraged to create separate accounts when invited to a Team and warned that Teams admins will have control over the account. We want individual and Team Dropbox users to have the best possible experience. Some users want to migrate their personal accounts into a Team. Others are much happier with separate personal and Teams accounts. We’ve been working to make that choice much clearer for the account holder and the Teams admin. If users do choose to merge their personal account with a Team, things become a bit tricky. Teams admins want better control of data within a Team, and users want easy access to their personal stuff, but it’s not possible for us to differentiate between Team data and personal stuff in the same account. Here are some thoughts on the points raised by the OP: * Better support for multiple accounts: Users can quickly switch between using personal and Teams accounts on the web today and we intend to make this better across our platforms. * Improved messaging to Teams admins: We plan to provide better messaging to admins before disabling an account that was migrated in. * Disabled accounts are not immediately deleted: We can work with Teams admins and users to sort out account issues and recover users’ files. We’ve contacted the OP to help resolve his case and are sorry for any pain this caused!
- monochromatic 14y agoless likely Well, I guess that's a start...
- tomp 14y agoHow hard can it be? At least you could restore all the files that were present on the user's account before it was made into a Team account... If courts can do it in case of a divorce, I guess a technology startup could as well.
- bjxrn 14y agoEverything is easy if someone else has to do it, isn't it.
- ghurlman 14y ago
- inevitable 14y agoSo, have you learned why relying on "cloud" storage is BAD?
- pasbesoin 14y agoI am amazed -- but not surprised -- that you would role out the "Team" feature without thinking through -- and solving -- such scenarios. It seems to be a small minority of people who really do so. And often, they are ignored or even berated, and "slow-tracked", until the shit hits the fan. If the account is accurate, I have no sympathy for Dropbox on this. This was entirely predictable, and any amount of effective due diligence would have mitigated it. P.S. Of course, it also goes to say to the "victim": Dropbox is synchronization, not back-up. You need to back your shit up to a medium over which you have control. (Said control including taking it off-line where no online activity can affect it.)
- benjlang 14y agoYoni - what's your twitter handle?
- nigelsampson 14y agoI've run into this problem as well, for me the easiest solution was to run Skydrive for personal and Dropbox teams for work.
- TommyDANGerous 14y agoHaha, great read. Still love Dropbox though. Great and fast responses, way to go Dropbox. Keep up the good work.
- georgelawrence 14y agoDon't worry... Guido will fix everything next month ;-)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- lucian303 14y agoIf it's not in their TOS (and the FAQ linked to wouldn't count) then you have a great case of willful negligence against both Dropbox and your previous employer. I'd take it to small claims court and sue them for the time and money you spent trying to recover your account.
- jacquesm 14y agoDropbox does one thing and does one thing well. They've worked really hard to keep feature creep to a minimum. Dropbox for teams is a feature that adds so much over and beyond the initial KISS offering that the cracks in the 'just one folder' model are beginning to show. Ideally you'd have two or more folders marked as dropbox folders where you could associate each individual folder with the team or not at will. Now your only real solution from what I can see is to create multiple accounts, if you don't want to give the team administrator the chance to nuke your account if he/she feels like it. Warnings about the possible consequences do not really solve the underlying issue and having the original team leader have a say in the unblocking of your account doesn't help at all. This is a feature that will need some serious work and breaks the simple dropbox model that has gotten dropbox to where it is today.
- Firehed 14y agoNot just that, but cleaning up (er, creating) multi-sign-on support. We've fortunately decided to only use our company domain emails for Dropbox for Teams, but because I can only be logged in to one Dropbox account at a time, it prevents me from using my personal account on my work computer. Some may argue that's a good thing, but I don't particularly care about that clean personal/work separation[1] for the stuff in my personal Dropbox account. Arguably by putting the "for teams" content in a completely isolated directory it solves the need for being able to sign in to multiple accounts at once[2], but there's still going to be some weirdness if my personal account is added as a team member of a work directory, since then you'd either start getting work stuff on personal machines or have to do per-device authorization which will be a nightmare for team administrators of even a dozen or so people. The whole thing gets really nasty when you realize that DBFT adds something like 50-100GB/member. I don't need giant photoshop files from our marketing or design teams eating up all the free space on my tiny little Macbook Air. My dropbox status window says I have over 3TB free (yes, terabytes); by default, I have to micromanage selective folder syncing to prevent my hard drive from being immediately filled after signing in. There seems to be a little disconnect between "team" and "company" in how this is used, unlike say Github where it's just people in a relatively ad-hoc group. [1] I don't go the other way (work files on a personal machine) however. It would create numerous liabilities in terms of file security and IP ownership, among other areas. Except for my iPhone, I won't even open work email on any of my personal devices. There's just too much potentially-sensitive material, and I don't care for the inconvenience of heavily locking down my personal machines to deal with that when they don't really have anything important. [2] and avoids the possible problem of people signing up under multiple email addresses for free space.
- robomartin 14y agoI am repeating a portion of one of my comments here because I think it could be very useful to many Dropbox users. If you implement this tonight you will, effectively, isolate your local data from Dropbox and any accidental loss at Dropbox will not result in total loss locally. Of course, you are responsible for local backups. If this gets up-voted to the top of the thread it might just help a lot of people avoid accidental loss of valuable data. My approach for Dropbox on both Windows and OSX is to have the Dropbox folder on a dedicated drive partition. If that is not possible, you can use a drive that will never see development work or any data that will need to be shared via Dropbox (business data, kid's pictures, etc.). This forces a FILE COPY operation rather than a FILE MOVE operation when you drag-and-drop files into any Dropbox folder. Which, in turn, means that everything in Dropbox could be trashed tomorrow and nothing whatsoever would be lost locally. For years I have gotten in the habit of having at least two physical drives on every machine: System and Data. If I don't want to create a dedicated Dropbox partition I can usually place my Dropbox folder in the System drive and this will trigger copy-on-drag-and-drop whenever dragging files in from the Data drive. If you don't have separate physical System and Data drives (highly recommended) you can split a single drive into System and Data partitions or simply split-off a Dropbox partition in order to achieve the same results. DROPBOX FEATURE REQUEST: It would be very nice if the Dropbox client software could have an option to auto-magically COPY files in and out of Dropbox rather than allowing any files to be moved.
- NuZZ 14y agoHaven't seen it mentioned here; but I am in the process of switching to Cubby from DropBox. It's new. Seeing as how DropBox's most requested features are mostly ignored on their "VoteBox" part of their site, I noticed disgruntled users on said site suggesting Cubby. Sync any folder, security keys, don't have to use the cloud, better data retention, more space, better desktop app, more features in general. https://www.cubby.com/ https://www.cubby.com/ Yeah, almost seems too good to be true. If anyone uses it perhaps they can share some downsides.
- lsc 14y agoLesson here is that the best practice for a backup system is to make it so that two (or more) different entities need to screw it up at the same time for you to lose data. Because entities do screw it up. Note, the hardest part, here? is that you are one of the entities. It's very hard to design a system where a hostile entity compromising owner credentials can't lead to data loss. Best I could think of would be a service that keeps your data available in read only mode for a certain period of time (for which you pre-pay) - but I don't know of anyone offering such a service. I suppose a stack of blue-rays in a safety deposit box would come dang close; I mean, sure if /all/ of your credentials were compromised you are still screwed, but if they can impersonate you in person at the bank... well, that's a worse compromise than most people plan for.
- toddmorey 14y agoThis happened to me, too. Same situation. They were able to fix it after some discussion, but it was pretty crazy that it's set up this way.
- Volpe 14y agoAs a dropbox team admin for my company, I recently removed a member from the team. It explains in bright red writing (from memory) that it will remove the members entire dropbox account. I remember, because I contacted the team member, and got him to back everything up before I procceded. I then contacted Dropbox support, to explain how stupid this was... My point is, that admin should have some accountability, ignoring big red writing is usually a bad idea.
- constantx 14y agoHad this happened to me a while back. They don't completely "delete" your stuff, just disable access to it. After contact support and the admin of the account, everything is sugar again.
- scottschulthess 14y agoWho joins a team account from your worst enemy?
- joering2 14y agoI dont get it why someone would use Dropbox in the first place? Google Drive is out for a long enough and it never failed for me; it gives 150% more capacity for free (5gb) and its made by folks @ Google (hello?). Just don't see any reason why to use Dropbox...
- CamperBob2 14y agoGoogle has a longstanding history of severe corporate ADHD. I think a given startup's odds of long-term survival are better than the odds of a similar non-cord initiative surviving equally long inside Google.
- Paul12345534 14y agoLocal mirrored copies of all files on separate hard drive. Bank safety deposit box with bluray discs of files for long-term storage, things that rarely change (my photography work alone is several TBs). Rapidshare (using 3TB right now for the same $8 a month, I accept it's not the most reliable place if a Megaupload situation ever happened). Skydrive for my important documents and programming work. Small program I wrote makes the Rapidshare/Skydrive backups incremental and encrypted on a regular schedule.
- znowi 14y agoI find it outrageous that it takes a story to go public and hit HN for Dropbox support to start doing their job! And so is the pattern for many companies that grow beyond a certain threshold of celebrity. This is a sure indication for me not to trust the company.