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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

#171

Post by robomartin »

ubershmekel wrote: post #167
robomartin wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Down-voted because I think that it is just dumb to have a Dropbox account and forgo local backup of the files on the service. Dropbox is not an extension of your mission-critical local storage and backup. 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…

Do you not trust dropbox as a backup of your data at all or do you require 2 backups of everything?

This has NOTHING to do with Dropbox or not trusting it. As a developer, if you've been around computers for more than a microsecond the NECESSITY and VALUE of backups don't need to be explained. Dropbox is not backup, no matter what anyone says.

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

#172

Post by wooster »

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…

You should really consider redesigning this feature. Having "Teams" control all the personal accounts of their employees means none of my companies can use it. So, we're stuck with folder sharing for the foreseeable future.

I'd expect Teams to work like folder sharing, but with the storage not counting towards the individual account space limits.

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

#173

Post by rpearl »

rogerbinns wrote: post #165
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…

> ... individual Dropbox users are encouraged to create separate accounts ... If only your software actually worked in that scenario. Every single piece of your software is hard wired to believe you only have exactly one account. For example the Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS clients, as well as the website. To see your other account involves logouts and logging back in again having to enter the other account e…

Dropbox engineer here. There should be a drop-down item to switch accounts: https://www.dropboxatwork.com/2012/12/easily-switch-between-...

The first time you select 'Switch Accounts' you will be able to log in your personal account. After that, you will be able to switch accounts without having to type the other username every time.

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

#174

Post by mnutt »

apike wrote: post #159
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…

> Teams admins want better control of data within a Team Some admins do I'm sure. We had to cancel Teams because of this. :( Let me explain: most people at Steamclock sync personal stuff in their Dropbox, and we want to also share a large folder. Upgrading everybody to Teams seemed like a good idea, but the "company owns what's in your dropbox" thinking forced everybody to have two separate accounts, and the "only on…

It's probably against their TOS, but it is possible to run your personal dropbox account and a team account on the same machine. It's a pain to set up, but works well once it's running. And since you're paying for both anyway, it seems like it's at least in the spirit of the TOS.

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

#175

Post by robomartin »

jiayo wrote: post #164
robomartin wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Down-voted because I think that it is just dumb to have a Dropbox account and forgo local backup of the files on the service. Dropbox is not an extension of your mission-critical local storage and backup. 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…

> At best this is an unfortunate "pilot error" and at worst this is a sign of incompetence. I'm not sure knowledge of an obscure Windows-specific drag and drop quirk should be a requirement for using Dropbox safely. > you do have separate system and data drives on your machines, right? I'm not sure use of a partition table editor should be a requirement for using Dropbox safely. Most people use the operating system t…

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 you'll take my advice and go implement it right now.

> Most people use the operating system that came installed on their PC as-is.

Developers are not "most people" and should certainly not behave as such. Your data is the only thing that is important. Your work product. Investing in separate drivers (not partitions, separate physical drives) on every development machine is invaluable. And, backing-them up with disk images on a daily basis is just as important. If the system drive goes out your data is intact. If the data drive goes out the system is intact. Recovery is an academic exercise. If both drives go out it is a little more of a pain in the ass, but at most you'll loose a day's worth of work, not a lifetime or a whole year's worth.

> Dropbox makes the following claims on their website:

Pardon the raw-ness: I don't give a shit of what anyone says or claims about any service. Neither should you or any serious developer. You, and only you are responsible for the safety of your data. You HAVE TO assume failures, not just locally, but also remotely. Hardware fails. Software fucks-up. Even if Dropbox (or name your service) guaranteed 500% redundancy I'd still have my own backups. It would be irresponsible to do otherwise.

Then there's the practicality of the whole thing. The machine I am using to type this has the following physical drives (not partitions on a single drive, these are independent pieces of hardware in the chassis):

    Internal backup drive
    External backup drive (USB)
    System drive
    Data
    Library
    Development
The last four are backed-up daily with incremental backups to both backup drives.

The data drive alone has over 300GB of data right now. The Library and Development drives are about 150GB of data each. That's 600GB of valuable work in three drives probably representing millions of dollars of work-product and value.

So, Dropbox is backup, right? 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.

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

#176

Post by smokey_the_bear »

apike wrote: post #159
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…

> Teams admins want better control of data within a Team Some admins do I'm sure. We had to cancel Teams because of this. :( Let me explain: most people at Steamclock sync personal stuff in their Dropbox, and we want to also share a large folder. Upgrading everybody to Teams seemed like a good idea, but the "company owns what's in your dropbox" thinking forced everybody to have two separate accounts, and the "only on…

Our company would also love the option of paying for shared folder, instead of teams. We currently have teams, but it's not quite what we want, and if we temporarily want to share a folder with a client it is an big hassle.

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

#177

Post by csense »

rogerbinns wrote: post #168
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…

All my systems (Linux) use btrfs and I have cron jobs making regular snapshots including of the Dropbox folders, so even if horrible things happened I still would have access to the original files. I'd have to have Dropbox mess up server side and have something bad happen to all of my client machines. On Windows you can get the same effect using VSS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy

How is BTRFS these days?

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?

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

#178

Post by gus_massa »

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…

Is it possible that the unused machine has the wrong date? Perhaps that confused the operative system file dates and Dropbox.

(I have an old machine that hardly use now that has problems with the motherboard battery and sometime it travels in time to a funny date like 2000 and all the security certificates are marked as wrong.)

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

#179

Post by csense »

justinschuh wrote: post #17

Intermingling personal and work accounts is almost always a bad idea. I've seen colleagues get their personal accounts subpoenaed, have a firing result in loss of primary email/cell, or have really awkward communications show up in an IT audit. The overhead of maintaining separate accounts is very small (multi-profile browser, multi-account smartphone, etc.), and more than worth it given the liabilities. Beyond that,…

> Intermingling personal and work accounts

Yes, this is a bad idea.

The problem seems to be that this particular service provider has "one person, one account" and "one computer, one account" baked deeply into their design. Which makes it difficult-to-impossible for people to use more than one account.

This approach probably simplified things when they were making it; as a startup, maybe the complexity would have been outside of the development resources if they hadn't made these simplifying assumptions of the model.

But by now these assumptions are so deeply baked into every part of the service that it'd be really hard for them to change.

This is just a guess; I'm not affiliated with Dropbox in any way, and I've never even used their service.

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