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

Well it works but it's like running on 3 pistons. It's a serious pain to set up, when the Dropbox client is updated you need to update the 3rd party standalone client which breaks half of the time, and you need to manually switch to either one or the other (if you have one 'official' and one 'pendrive' version). Oh and it messes with your icon overlays on Windows. Massive pain, I regret going Dropbox for Teams but I'm sort of married to our setup now. The way it works is not clear at all - I had issues similar to the OP's which required support to resolve.

I 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.

I believe he was referring to the claim that switching on an old computer that hadn't been synced in awhile deleted tens of thousands of files. Not the original post.

> How is BTRFS these days?

Works fine for me. I use it on every system and have it on a desktop, a laptop, a server and a HTPC. It is used on SSD, HDD (SATA and USB), RAID 0, RAID 1 and over dmcrypt. The only place I do not use it is one filesystem for MongoDB, and it would probably work fine there too if I disabled COW.

The builtin checksums (and scrub) functionality are crucial to me. I had a drive start to fail with ext4 and the only reasonable way to do a scrub would be to take it offline which I calculated would take 23 hours (plus a huge amount of extra work to map bad sectors back to relevant files). At some point a failed sector had also lead to ext4 giving back zeroes when the containing file was copied. btrfs has two copies of metadata by default so an unfortunately placed bad sector is less likely to wipe out knowledge of entire trees or files (happened to me with ext4 as well when a directory disappeared).

The volume management is great too. It is really easy to add and remove devices/partitions without having to take systems down, change between raid levels etc. You can do the same thing with LVM (which I was using before) but it is a lot of fiddly work to get the right commands and options, plus deal with physical and logical. It is one command to add or remove a partition with btrfs and it is trivial to work out what the command is from 'btrfs --help'. (LVM requires several different commands to be run which I always had to lookup and often had a lot of difficulty with such as running RAID 0 with partitions of different sizes.) btrfs also only does operations on the actual used portions. eg if I change from RAID0 to RAID1 on a filesystem where I am using 1GB of 1TB space then it will only worry about that 1GB not the whole 1TB. LVM can't see into the filesystem to know what is actually used.

I have compression (LZO) turned on everywhere. You can't (currently) find out how effective it has been, but I do have a lot of data files that are highly compressible (eg CSV files, SQL dumps). It is more convenient to have them expanded than to teach every single program that accesses them how to decompress on the fly.

I used to use rsync and hard links to make snapshots. These completely hammered the machine when run causing large amounts of I/O since all metadata has to be scanned plus all changed/new files. Consequently I only made daily snapshots. With btrfs making snapshots is virtually instantaneous and is unaffected by how much data has changed, size of volume, I/O speeds etc. I now make snapshots hourly.

Ultimately I have things such that I will proactively find out about bad sectors and similar low level corruption, have snapshots to deal with issues over time, and have data replicated over machines (mostly via Dropbox and git/hg), both local and remote. I am not relying on the filesystem of any one machine to always be perfect.

> Also, since you seem to be knowledgeable about Linux, why do you use Dropbox at all, instead of just git or rsync or scp or whatever?

Because Dropbox just works. Many of the alternatives haven't figured that out yet, assuming they even support Linux. The importance of actually working can't be overstated. It also requires no administration or maintenance. Sync automatically happens when machines are on and there is appropriate network connectivity without requiring any baby sitting from me.

I use git/hg for source which is their sweet spot. Using something like rsync is a pain once you have more than two machines, and it requires a full blown system accessible offsite for an offsite copy which is yet more administration and maintenance.

git/rsync/scp aren't usable from mobile devices. I do things like put documents, ebooks, photos, and music into dropbox which makes them be present on everything, no messing around needed. Dropbox behaves very much like DVCS for that kind of content doing an N-way sync, having a history (you can get last 30 days by default, more if you pay more or use a team account).

Finally Dropbox allows collaboration. You can easily share files and directories. I can do a software build for Android, put the APK in a shared folder and a colleague can install the app on their device without hassle. Various tools run periodic reports and put their output in shared folders which makes it available to everyone even if they then happen to jump on a plane.

Haven'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/

Yeah, almost seems too good to be true. If anyone uses it perhaps they can share some downsides.