> He brought out the part of the HN crowd that wants things to be on-topic and/or useful instead of user-blaming
Right. You didn't obviously read my comments, did you? Maybe you just skimmed them and chose to jump on the band-wagon?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963826
I'll quote the most relevant and definitely constructive/useful parts here you don't have to bother with the links if you don't want to. If you do, please slow down and read it all. Then think about the idea of loosing, I don't know, a year's worth of work and blaming someone else for it.
Here it is (reformatted because HN does not have a much-needed block-quote markup):
My approach for Dropbox on both Windows and OSX is to have the
Dropbox folder on a drive that will never see development work,
even if that means creating a separate partition for it.
In most cases the system drive works fine (you do have separate
system and data drives on your machines, right?).
This forces a COPY operation rather than a file MOVE if you
drag-and-drop files into any Dropbox folder. Which means that
everything in the Dropbox folder could be trashed tomorrow and
nothing whatsoever would be lost.
Do this TODAY and unless you have massive local loss of data you don't have to worry about Dropbox loosing any of your data at all. Not one bit. If that isn't constructive I don't know what it.
Then I also said:
FEATURE REQUEST: It would be very nice if 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.
The above-mentioned hack works fine but it'd be nice to not have to
use it. Also, I'd venture to guess that most Dropbox users don't do
this, which opens them to unintended loss.
In other words, if Dropbox could implement the suggested approach EVERYONE, engineer or not, would be spared of total data loss due to something going on at Dropbox. Local data loss, of course, is still your responsibility.
And then, trying to understand further, I asked this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963768
So, I'll say that overall I've been pretty constructive. If anyone adopts my approach of storing their Dropbox folder in an unused drive they are almost guaranteed that Dropbox can't loose their data. That is worth money.
Please point me to a link or blog post with your immediate solutions to this problem. I'd love to compare notes. Maybe there's a better approach. Always interested in learning. I am sure there are lots of people who, tonight, might be interested in adopting your approach to ensuring that accidental data loss by a remote service of any kind does not mean total data loss locally.
Thanks.