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How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

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Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

#111

Post by dbecker »

natural219 wrote: post #16

This 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…

Treating every dropped use case as a public relations crisis is just an exercise in getting yourself worked up for no reason.

Whether or not it's a PR crisis, it is at a gotcha that is worth knowing about.

Unless, of course, you're the type of person that just likes to get pissed off at companies.

Reading this didn't make me pissed off. DropBox made a mistake, which I assume they will fix. In the mean time, reading this made us better informed and safer.

Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

#113

Post by Dylan16807 »

justinschuh wrote: post #67
john-n wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they just have to remove anns access to any team based information, same as she was prior to joining?

How 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-…

Dropbox 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.

Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

#114

Post by pc86 »

edanm wrote: post #107

Another 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…

While 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

Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

#116

Post by mikeash »

pc86 wrote: post #114
edanm wrote: post #107

Another 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…

While 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

People 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.....

Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

#117

Post by wildmXranat »

edanm wrote: post #107

Another 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…

So the silver lining is still that they came through and restored the data, aside from the fact that the old and presumably really old Dropbox client on it went haywire. Yes, Dropbox is free and no I don't expect them to have a file retention guarantee that safeguards my stuff against nuclear holocaust, but I feel for you friend. In this case, storing files is all that Dropbox does. If my harddrive decided to do that intermittently, I'd purchase a new drive and probably mirrored them.

Why not come up with some sort of open-sync protocol where you could have your data mirrored by many Dropbox like services at once

Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

#118

Post by areohbe »

I 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.

Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

#119

Post by sean_lynch »

Hey 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!

Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

#120

Post by monochromatic »

sean_lynch wrote: post #119

Hey 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 T…

less likely

Well, I guess that's a start...

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