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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

#191

Post by crazygringo »

robomartin wrote: post #185
gabemart wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At best this is an unfortunate "pilot error" It is in no way "pilot error". If the post you replied to is correct, the dropbox software performed an action it should never perform - deleting files the user did not tell the OS to delete. What's more, every dropbox plan I'm aware of keeps deleted files for 30 days, so if it wasn't possible to recover some of the files, dropbox failed not once but twice. It's all very…

The "pilot error" is in not testing the solution before trusting it and in making an assumption that the data would be safe in an untested external system. Let me put it into a financial context. I did a project that added up to some $800K in cost. Two developers over about a year. Do you think that for even a microsecond I would trust Dropbox as a backup mechanism without extensive qualification and testing? And, wo…

How did you even get to talking about engineers and testing/qualification and $800K projects?

Dropbox is a consumer service, also useful for businesses. Nobody's trusting it with the nuclear launch codes. But no matter what, it should never, ever delete your files, unless you do it yourself. Period. And if it's ever unsure, it should ask you.

It's meant to be used with the primary copies of your files, not relegated to a special drive. If it deletes your files wrongly, the fault is clearly with Dropbox. It's marketed as an easy-to-use product you just install and use.

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

#192

Post by lucisferre »

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…

I'm considering Google Drive for company filesharing. I've always found shared folders on Dropbox are pretty awkward. Hopefully GD will be a bit easier, but only time will tell. The one thing I can be sure of is it won't need to interfere with peoples personal Dropbox accounts.

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

#193

Post by icambron »

robomartin wrote: post #175
jiayo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The OP never said their colleague was a developer. And Dropbox isn't specifically marketed towards developers. When you develop software aimed at the general public, which Dropbox does, you do have to worry about most people. And regardless of how irresponsible the user was or how knowledgable they were, it's still a screw-up on Dropbox's part. "You shouldn't have relied on this service" != "this service isn't doing anything wrong when it breaks." You should lock your doors at night, but the robber who just saunters in to steal your stuff is still a badguy.

Also, since this is HN, let's talk about how we build software, as in, put yourself in the position of the Dropbox developer and instead of just the end user. Most of us, I imagine, build software used by non-developers. I hope your attitude towards these things isn't "fuck it, if they were a competent developer like me, they'd have known better", and instead, "damn, I really need to go bulletproof my software so it doesn't delete people's data like that." In that context, there's plenty to criticize and learn from in Dropbox's mistakes here.

Edit: grammar

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

#194

Post by robomartin »

moconnor wrote: post #181
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…

Lots of people use Dropbox just like this, without local backups. For many people I know, that's part of the point - versioning helps, too. It's certainly neither 'dumb' and nor is mentioning a friend who did this down-vote worthy.

Using anything this way (meaning, without testing and without knowing of what you might be exposing yourself to) is absolutely dumb.

The down-vote wasn't for posting about his friend's experience. The down-vote was about his friend and also for blaming Dropbox for something that was 100% his friend's responsibility.

Let's bring it down to a "skin in the game experience".

- Save-up $250K - Invest all of it in a startup - Hire a couple of programmers to help you out - None of you setup any local backups - You choose to rely on web service X for backups - You don't test anything 'cause everyone is doing it this way - You still don't have local backups - A year later something goes wrong and you loose all of your work - You just lost all of your time, money and the startup tanks - You go online and blame service X for your loss

Clearly service X had nothing to do with the series of decisions and actions that led to your loss. Your loss was due to "pilot error" and plain-old home-grown incompetence. Nothing more, nothing less. Blaming someone else might feel good, but the reality is that a less-than-professional treatment of the matter is what caused the loss. Service X was just along for the ride.

I quit blaming others a long, long time ago. In my experience you can do forensics in almost all of these situations and identify someone who was either dumb, lazy or incompetent who ended-up giving you the gift of irrecoverable data loss.

Like I said in my original post, I was EXTREMELY lucky to have learned this lesson while in college. I lost six months of work of a project for the Physics department to a drive failure. Horribly painful. Ugly. I am so thankful for having learned that lesson in that context. It would have sucked to have learned it outside of academia and while working on projects where data loss could have resulted in significant financial loss.

My sentiment stands: With local storage being so plentiful and inexpensive these days there is no excuse for not having multiple redundant backups of anything that is important. You can even have a policy of shipping physical redundant backups to another storage location to mitigate the possibility of your local backups being compromised by something like a building-wide fire.

In another post I treat the other fundamental issue of backups over connectivity such as DSL.

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

#195

Post by Yoni1 »

sean_lynch wrote: post #184
Yoni1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, OP here - First of all, in Dropbox's defense, I probably did not give you guys enough time to respond before going public with this (also, living in Israel I sometimes forget that Sunday is a weekend for most people in the world). I apologize for that. I am not a journalist/blogger, and I was driven more by my emotions than by "journalistic ethics" (?) when submitting to HN. Second, according to your support ema…

When migrating an account into a team, the account and all the data in the account becomes managed by the Teams admin (shared or otherwise). Letting an existing account to join a team lets us smoothly support the situation where a user has created a Dropbox account separately and needs to move that account into the team. For most cases though, users should create a new account for the team. The Dropbox for Teams sign…

From your reply, it sounds much worse than I thought. I had no idea my team admin could see all my data until now!

If joining a team account changed after your October changes, then maybe it's okay now. But I included in my post the email I got for joining the team, and it makes no mention of the fact that the team admin now owns my data. One would think this email should be less bland and more cautioning.

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

#196

Post by robomartin »

crazygringo wrote: post #191
robomartin wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "pilot error" is in not testing the solution before trusting it and in making an assumption that the data would be safe in an untested external system. Let me put it into a financial context. I did a project that added up to some $800K in cost. Two developers over about a year. Do you think that for even a microsecond I would trust Dropbox as a backup mechanism without extensive qualification and testing? And, wo…

How did you even get to talking about engineers and testing/qualification and $800K projects? Dropbox is a consumer service, also useful for businesses. Nobody's trusting it with the nuclear launch codes. But no matter what, it should never, ever delete your files, unless you do it yourself. Period. And if it's ever unsure, it should ask you. It's meant to be used with the primary copies of your files, not relegated…

Well, let's just agree to disagree. Get a few more years under your belt and loose some valuable work for relying on such services without local backup and, yes, testing and qualification and then we can talk. Perhaps then you'll understand where I am coming from. There's nothing more painful than such a loss to make it clear that YOU are responsible for your data and nobody else is, no matter what the claims might say.

I cannot blame Dropbox if I loose data. Maybe the service has issues, but loosing my data is MY ISSUE, not theirs. The minute you trust service X with your data without full qualification and testing is the minute you lost your data. Don't blame them for it.

> Dropbox is a consumer service, also useful for businesses.

Same point. Same issues. If you put all of your documents and financial data on Dropbox (or service X) and don't take the steps to have local (and possibly redundant) backups you could easily be confused for a moron. Blaming service X for it is a cop-out. They had nothing to do with the total loss. Yes, they had everything to do with the partial loss.

It is my contention that it is your responsibility to fully qualify such services rather than using them blindly.

I use Dropbox extensively and have ZERO concerns about data loss.

Maybe experience has made me less trusting with what is important to me than a typical user? I could not imagine saving my kids pictures on service X without any other backups. That would be insane. And, if for any reason, service X looses my pictures I was the moron who allowed that to happen. They might suck, but it was my fault, not theirs that I lost EVERYTHING.

Maybe that's the real point I am trying to make: Loosing EVERYTHING is YOUR fault. Loosing WHAT IS STORED IN DROPBOX could be their fault. If you don't have backups for what you store in Dropbox (or service X) you are responsible for the TOTAL LOSS not service X.

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

#197

Post by alexkcd »

zaidf wrote: post #183
codygman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only display the teams folder if the user is a member of one or more teams... easy fix.

Let's say I start with a Personal account. I use it for a few weeks. In this time, you are saying there won't be a Personal folder, right? So in a few weeks I am added to a Team. The Teams and Personal folders appear. Does this mean all the file paths for files inside my Personal folder change to /Personal/ ?

This isn't a problem. Just make it work the way shared folders already do. When I join a team, create a folder with the team's name in the Dropbox root, and optionally (or in case of conflicts) let me also choose the folder name.

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

#198

Post by enraged_camel »

robomartin wrote: post #185
gabemart wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At best this is an unfortunate "pilot error" It is in no way "pilot error". If the post you replied to is correct, the dropbox software performed an action it should never perform - deleting files the user did not tell the OS to delete. What's more, every dropbox plan I'm aware of keeps deleted files for 30 days, so if it wasn't possible to recover some of the files, dropbox failed not once but twice. It's all very…

The "pilot error" is in not testing the solution before trusting it and in making an assumption that the data would be safe in an untested external system. Let me put it into a financial context. I did a project that added up to some $800K in cost. Two developers over about a year. Do you think that for even a microsecond I would trust Dropbox as a backup mechanism without extensive qualification and testing? And, wo…

I'm bummed out that so many people down-voted you when you put so much effort into your post. I think you inadvertently brought out the shitty, immature side of the HN crowd. :)

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #189
gus_massa wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

You'd think Dropbox on each computer would check the last time it had synced, using the time reported from a Dropbox server. I pray they wouldn't ever rely on users' own system clocks.

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by sirclueless »

csense wrote: post #177
rogerbinns wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Can't speak for roger, but I find it is very useful for syncing across OS's, and sharing files with friends (though ever since my school went Google apps, Google Drive has been the go-to for this kind of thing).
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