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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

#141

Post by napoleond »

joering2 wrote: post #139
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…

> Disabled accounts are not immediately deleted: We can work with Teams admins and users to sort out account issues and recover users’ files. Wait a sec, does this mean when I delete my files they are ... not being deleted? > We’ve contacted the OP to help resolve his case and are sorry for any pain this caused! Great, good for him. So basically next time when I or others have problems with Dropbox, post a rant about…

Wait a sec, does this mean when I delete my files they are ... not being deleted?

This is true of almost every service on the internet. If it wasn't, whenever the only disk that had your account on it failed you would be absolutely livid about the fact that they never made any backups. (It is generally infeasible to purge backups of any deleted data, because they're stored in compressed blobs.)

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

#142

Post by justjimmy »

Yoni1 wrote: post #138
lucaspiller wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what we do. What are the advantages of the Team plan over this?

A lot more storage and some more features.

Like what features?

It seems its a can of worms right now and the suitable fix seems to be removing the storage limit on shared folders (shared to those individuals who do not own the original folders being shared).

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

#143

Post by johnrob »

josso wrote: post #135
johnrob wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of pure curiosity, why is it that the OP's original requests for help were ignored? Is it recommended that to get better support you should make a public case of it? A lot of larger companies seem to operate this way.

Honestly, OP didn't give them enough time to respond. OP said that it was only yesterday that the team revoked his account. I could imagine that given it was both a sunday and a day or two before Christmas (depending on where you are) that the Dropbox support probably wasn't fully staffed.

Aha - thanks, I didn't realize how recent the request was.

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

#144

Post by barking »

mikeash wrote: post #137
drivers99 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoot. I've been thinking of dropbox as my backup. Now I wonder what would qualify as backup considering I want it to be automated and preferably not require me to write to media like DVDs. (Time Machine seems to be doing the trick on the Mac side, although... having all the backup media connected to the machine it's backing up means it's susceptible to simultaneous deletion, as well not being offsite means it is sus…

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....

Absolutely you need to test your restores, regularly!

I used to use Mozy but when I tried a trial restore it was taking forever and missing some files. Also it inserts these .PART files into your system that can almost double the size of the folders you're trying to back up.

I looked at backblaze but it doesn't work with server computers.

So I'm now trying crashplan. I'm really interested in the feature of crashplan which allows automated backups to other computers. Only problem is that I've not been able to get this to work so far. Backing up to the cloud is working well though. Also its very competitively priced. I've yet to try a restore.

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

#146

Post by pc86 »

drivers99 wrote: post #125
mikeash wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.....

Shoot. I've been thinking of dropbox as my backup. Now I wonder what would qualify as backup considering I want it to be automated and preferably not require me to write to media like DVDs. (Time Machine seems to be doing the trick on the Mac side, although... having all the backup media connected to the machine it's backing up means it's susceptible to simultaneous deletion, as well not being offsite means it is sus…

I would take a look at the link in my comment, there is a neat way to using external drives for Mac and Linux. I'm sure there's a similar way to schedule it in Windows, and I wish the author had gone into that instead of his tongue in cheek bashing, but I don't know it off the top of my head.

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

#147

Post by joering2 »

napoleond wrote: post #141
joering2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disabled accounts are not immediately deleted: We can work with Teams admins and users to sort out account issues and recover users’ files. Wait a sec, does this mean when I delete my files they are ... not being deleted? > We’ve contacted the OP to help resolve his case and are sorry for any pain this caused! Great, good for him. So basically next time when I or others have problems with Dropbox, post a rant about…

Wait a sec, does this mean when I delete my files they are ... not being deleted? This is true of almost every service on the internet. If it wasn't, whenever the only disk that had your account on it failed you would be absolutely livid about the fact that they never made any backups. (It is generally infeasible to purge backups of any deleted data, because they're stored in compressed blobs.)

> This is true of almost every service on the internet

can you back this claim up somehow? I recall Flicker losing bunch of profiles (photos) permanently because once its deleted, well its deleted.

What you are confusing is planned backups, in case of hard drive failure, and the fact that customer executed delete command and consent to get those files deleted. two different things.

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

#148

Post by mikeash »

barking wrote: post #144
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....

Absolutely you need to test your restores, regularly! I used to use Mozy but when I tried a trial restore it was taking forever and missing some files. Also it inserts these .PART files into your system that can almost double the size of the folders you're trying to back up. I looked at backblaze but it doesn't work with server computers. So I'm now trying crashplan. I'm really interested in the feature of crashplan…

One trouble with testing restores is that my likely avenue in the event of a real catastrophic failure that required a real restore would be to have them send me the data on a hard disk, to the tune of about $200. Not something I want to try just to make sure it works. I could try a download restore, but this would entail downloading a couple hundred GB of data, and wouldn't really exercise the same path I'd use in a real scenario. Any thoughts on the right way to approach it? Doing occasional small restores (usually using Backblaze as a sort of really slow Dropbox, restoring to a different computer when I need a file I forgot to share) at least gives me some peace of mind that the system works at all, but you're right that it's not quite rigorous.

For servers, I've heard good things about Tarsnap, but never used it myself.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

businessleads wrote: post #97
uptown wrote: post #86

If I were Dropbox, and designing this feature, I'd have created two folders inside the master Dropbox folder. "Personal" and "Teams" then inside the "Teams" folder, I'd have created a folder for each team a person is invited to join. I realize that structure wasn't in-place when Dropbox was first created, complicating the matter - but it seems like it would have provided the cleanest way to delineate what files and a…

Yes. Hopefully someone from the team reads this and forwards it onward with the subject header: "Implement this now [blocker]"

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by apike »

justjimmy wrote: post #129
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…

I'm curious, why don't the Company doesn't just share the folders with the Individual and revoke access to the shared folder when the Individual leaves? You won't have to combine to the Personal / Team together. And make it so that the shared folders doesn't count towards the Individual's account space limit. Bam. Problem solved (?)

We were on Dropbox for Teams but these kinds of problems forced us to go back to the personal accounts plus shared folders model.

The problem is, our shared folders DO count towards the individuals' space limits. So, we have seven people's personal Dropbox accounts on the company credit card. Not convinced this will scale.

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