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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

#251

Post by JohnHaugeland »

kamkazemoose wrote: post #237
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Client rigor doesn't help with server failure this severe. The guy lost everything because a temporary team membership was revoked. And now you're coming back to talk about your rigor, and how you catch things that fall through the cracks. This really comes off, to me at least, like LinkedIn did when after their breach and it was revealed they weren't even salting passwords, they tried to brag about their security, a…

He's replying to edanm, who had another problem, and not the blog author. His comment is more relevant to edanm's problem and I think it's fine.

... whoooooooops.

Sorry. Thanks for explaining. `:(`

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

#252

Post by JohnHaugeland »

jsmeaton wrote: post #236
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Client rigor doesn't help with server failure this severe. The guy lost everything because a temporary team membership was revoked. And now you're coming back to talk about your rigor, and how you catch things that fall through the cracks. This really comes off, to me at least, like LinkedIn did when after their breach and it was revealed they weren't even salting passwords, they tried to brag about their security, a…

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.

Quite right. My bad.

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

#253

Post by jonemo »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #226
arashf wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's just SSL cert validation :-)

Seems questionable to use the local time for that. System time isn't exactly a trusted quantity, is it?

iOS does it that way. My iPod touch always forgets date and time when it runs out of battery. After restart you can't do anything in the App Store or on https websites before you've set the correct date (it defaults to 1970 which is when the iPod was first introduced I believe).

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

#254

Post by Adirael »

Firehed wrote: post #203
mikeash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Backblaze. I have restored a few small files from them. I've never had to do the whole system, but I expect it to work well from what I've heard. Maybe I should actually test it....

I'm ok[1] with them for "I accidentally deleted a file" type stuff, I would not suggest it for a full system backup. I'd suggest SuperDuper! for that if you're on a Mac; I don't have any useful suggestions for Windows or Linux users (sorry!). Of course, I use a full system disk image for "I need to be up and running at 95% capacity within an hour", and these offsite file services as, basically, long-distance undo, or…

About the Network issues: something similar happened to me yesterday. I just moved to a new flat and my Internet connection went from 50MB/10MB to 10MB/1MB and if Backblaze starts a backup with the Automatic Throttle option on it just takes the whole upload bandwidth killing every other connection and rendering the connection unusable for the rest of the network.

I don't have any QoS set up on my home network, I found two fixes: running the backup manually before going to sleep (maybe I can create an Apple Script and just cron this) or turning the Automatic Throttle off and giving it the minimum available (for me) 20kbps.

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

#255

Post by Someguyy »

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…

I had this problem when I tried installing dropbox on my VPS. I wanted to use dropbox to get a small 1gb backup off of the server, as my puny ADSL would take days to do it, but for whatever reason, after it installed, I noticed on my current PC, 100's of "whatever.file has been deleted" notifications from my dropbox tray icon, and I was nearly dying, thankfully they have a restore option on their site, so I was able to "undelete" the files and save myself from losing so much data...

Seems dropbox really does believe if a file isn't there, it's been deleted.

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

#256

Post by robomartin »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #217
robomartin wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, let's take a look at your points: > I'm not sure knowledge of an obscure Windows-specific drag and drop quirk should be a requirement for using Dropbox safely. Not a "obscure Windows-specific drag and drop quirk". This is how the OS works. If you are a developer you need to know your OS. > I'm not sure use of a partition table editor should be a requirement for using Dropbox safely. It isn't, but if you are smart…

>Well, uploading 600GB to your "backup" would take somewhere in the order of 100 days of continuous 24/7 upload with my current DSL connection (~600Kbps upload speed). That's a third of a year. Nope, it's not backup. Apparently you've never heard of incremental backup? Dropbox may not be a backup but there are many services that backup via the internet. Assuming you don't change backup systems every month, 100 days f…

> Apparently you've never heard of incremental backup?

Oh, please.

> Dropbox may not be a backup but there are many services that backup via the internet. Assuming you don't change backup systems every month, 100 days for the initial sync is perfectly acceptable.

Oh, please. Again.

If you don't have local backup, for a third of a year you have no backup whatsoever. Even after that, depending on the nature of your work, even incremental backups could have you unprepared for failure for days.

Not saying at all that remote backup is a bad idea. Not at all.

Remote backup BY ITSELF, without local high-speed backup that you control is a very bad idea.

The best pattern is to have single or redundant backup under your control (yup, use that "incremental" thing I didn't know about) and remote backup. Don't expect anyone backup destination to be 100% reliable, not even local backup. If your data is important you need multiple redundant backup, local and remote. Then you can sleep at night.

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

#257

Post by icametosaythis »

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…

Sorry about your colleague's experience, but from my understanding of how Dropbox works even with old clients this shouldn't happen. Are you sure your friend hadn't deleted the contents of his Dropbox folder on that system and then turned the client back on later? That would definitely explain this. It'd be great to have your friend weigh in.

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

#258

Post by Tloewald »

jonemo wrote: post #253
CamperBob2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems questionable to use the local time for that. System time isn't exactly a trusted quantity, is it?

iOS does it that way. My iPod touch always forgets date and time when it runs out of battery. After restart you can't do anything in the App Store or on https websites before you've set the correct date (it defaults to 1970 which is when the iPod was first introduced I believe).

1970 ipod would be awesome.

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

#259

Post by rogerbinns »

rpearl wrote: post #247
rogerbinns wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had checked before posting and there was no such option. I did manage to make it appear in the end but it required logging out as my personal user and then logging as the team account and then logging in as personal again. Why not just make 'Switch Account' always be present rather than having one blessed starting point account? The wording also implies this won't work if you have two team accounts.

my wording is my own; i have not checked exactly what the restrictions on this feature are.

I meant the wording on the website. If I log out, then login to the team account and then choose "Switch Accounts" the resulting page says "Sign in to your personal account". That is what implies to me that it would have issues if I had two team accounts.

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

#260

Post by mayneack »

sean_lynch wrote: post #210
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 can't comment on this specific case, I do want to say there is a tremendous amount of rigor (and layers of protection) to ensure the end clients are resilient to misbehaving computers and do the right thing. For example, you shouldn't have to worry about the clock being accurate as it has no bearing on the final sync state. Just to dive in a bit for the HN crowd: We base the changes that should be applied to…

Let's say he's using packrat in this scenario, if he chooses to restore folder X, will it restore all the files ever in this folder with packrat?
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