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Dropbox should have understood that people are using it as a backup service. I mean carousel and other use cases sort of ebcourage and imply this. With that in

Dropbox should have understood that people are using it as a backup service. I mean carousel and other use cases sort of ebcourage and imply this. With that in mind, it baffling they didn't have any proper backups for user data.

danieldk 12y ago
It is a shame that they don't offer the unlimited packrat option anymore. It's still not backup, but at the very least people would be able to recover files in such cases. Also, if I understand correctly, Google Drive has a better policy here: removed files are just placed in the trash until you remove them from the trash. Of course, trash takes space up as well, but it protects better against such cases. I guess Dropbox is trying to maximize its profits with its 'remove after 30 days' policy.
- grey_golem 12y ago
  I have been using the "packrat" feature for more than a year, and Dropbox sent me a similar notification today to tell me they lost several thousand files, 816 could not been restored. They were "lost" around 8 months ago, so "packrat" didn't save me at all. As it turns out, I have other backups of most of the files, and the rest of them weren't important. So I was lucky. Still, my confidence in the product is unlikely to recover. I want to note that I had been aware of the "dropbox is not backup" chorus, but that argument usually is just "sync is not backup", which is sort of obvious. The packrat feature pretty much addressed this issue, so dropbox with packrat WAS a backup solution. So the lesson here is never to rely on any ONE backup provider.
mayneack 12y ago
I use packrat - so the files they suggest that I might have had deleted were recoverable (though none of them were an error). If dropbox kept backups like you're suggesting, people would be complaining about how you can't delete damning files from them and that law enforcement was abusing this.

danieldk 12y ago

It is a shame that they don't offer the unlimited packrat option anymore. It's still not backup, but at the very least people would be able to recover files in such cases. Also, if I understand correctly, Google Drive has a better policy here: removed files are just placed in the trash until you remove them from the trash. Of course, trash takes space up as well, but it protects better against such cases. I guess Dropbox is trying to maximize its profits with its 'remove after 30 days' policy.

grey_golem 12y ago
I have been using the "packrat" feature for more than a year, and Dropbox sent me a similar notification today to tell me they lost several thousand files, 816 could not been restored. They were "lost" around 8 months ago, so "packrat" didn't save me at all. As it turns out, I have other backups of most of the files, and the rest of them weren't important. So I was lucky. Still, my confidence in the product is unlikely to recover. I want to note that I had been aware of the "dropbox is not backup" chorus, but that argument usually is just "sync is not backup", which is sort of obvious. The packrat feature pretty much addressed this issue, so dropbox with packrat WAS a backup solution. So the lesson here is never to rely on any ONE backup provider.

mayneack 12y ago

I use packrat - so the files they suggest that I might have had deleted were recoverable (though none of them were an error). If dropbox kept backups like you're suggesting, people would be complaining about how you can't delete damning files from them and that law enforcement was abusing this.