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

These are the kind of lessons that for some reason don't transfer person-to-person like they should be only sink in once they've happened to you (at a guess, that's why you're being downvoted). Whether it is your corporate data worth $800K or your photographs of your first child hours after being born through the point that you realize that it is all gone data is priceless.

In the end it all boils down to the same thing: you can't outsource your responsibility on this one, and a single service holding your data still counts as a single point of failure.

Personal responsibility and the acceptance thereof is a major item on the checklist, anybody downvoting robomartin in this thread still has some learning to do on that front. Don't shoot the messenger if you don't like the message. Dropbox is not a backup, no matter what their marketing literature says and no matter how safe you think they are. In the end you and you alone are responsible for your data and its safety.

A back-up that you have not tried to restore might as well not be there.

Now your only real solution from what I can see is to create multiple accounts, if you don't want to give the team administrator the chance to nuke your account if he/she feels like it. Warnings about the possible consequences do not really solve the underlying issue and having the original team leader have a say in the unblocking of your account doesn't help at all.

This is a feature that will need some serious work and breaks the simple dropbox model that has gotten dropbox to where it is today.

There are two separate things going on in this discussion.

You have a personal responsibility to keep your data safe. I don't think anyone is disputing that.

Independently, softwares and services which handle user-created files should never, ever delete them without a direct instruction from the user. Regardless of your backup procedures, it is completely unacceptable for this to happen. Even if I had a copy of my data in a fire-proof safe on every continent, I would be appalled if I found that a file syncing and backup service like Dropbox had deleted some of my files and was unable to restore them, because i) it's an unacceptable thing for any software to do, and ii) it completely contradicts all of their company messaging.

Did you read the article this thread is about?

You could, of course, take the approach that Dropbox should be there to protect everyone from themselves.

Fair enough.

I have, in other comments, given the example of my own usage, which guarantees that no data can ever be lost by Dropbox. It's simple and it works. I've been constructive here. If you implement my approach you should be safe. Still, don't take my word for it, implement and verify. That's engineering.

I have also, in another comment, posted about a feature request that might help insure that this does not happen to casual users:

Dropbox, if possible, should modify their client software such that files can only be copied in and out of Dropbox folders and never moved. For the adventurous, they could make this an option that is set by default but can be disabled. A huge warning about the potential for data loss would accompany the act of disabling this feature.

In that regard, I've been as constructive as one could be in this thread.

In the end, you can't protect everyone from their own mistakes, incompetence or carelessness. And, no, I don't think everyone is stupid. We all make mistakes. I had a very painful data loss event in college, so I learned my lesson very early on. I have never lost valuable data since.

I am not going to blame a service for something that is the responsibility of the user. Engineers, in particular, have no excuse for data loss. A 2TB external hard drive is about $100. Please.

You could also argue that business users in this day and age cannot be computer illiterate. Being "literate" does not mean being able to open a browser and push a mouse around. If a business owner is not capable beyond that they ought to be smart enough to hire a qualified IT service to help them manage and secure their systems. If they do have in-house IT then data backup and security ought to be one of their top functions.

Private users are a little bit of a different story. There's a huge chunk of them that, today, could loose every digital asset they own and have no way to ever recover it. This is still a business opportunity for a startup somewhere. Services like Carbonite and others abound:

https://www.google.com/search?q=online+backup

At one point you have to point your finger at the data's owner and say "You, and only you, are responsible for your data".

I can guarantee you that if you read the TOS of any online data backup service there's a clause there about the potential for accidental loss. There is no way in hell that an attorney would advise anyone not to have that clause there. And, no matter how good of an engineer you might be, there is no way you would risk it all to offer some kind of an absolute no-loss guarantee.

The test is simple: Would you, personally, be willing to be sued into absolute poverty for issuing that guarantee? Probably not.

So, we can sit here in righteous indignation for me daring to suggest that users are ultimately responsible for their data and lie to each other or accept the reality that the reality, developer or not.

Down-vote away, but I am right.

If we go back to the very original article that this thread is about, the programmer who joined the startup team seems to have not had any explicitly-created local backup of the data in question. He got lucky. He said "The client left all the files on my machines, so I didn’t lose any personal data - it wasn’t a catastrophic failure.". That's luck, that is not planning. So, he did OK, he talks about having to re-upload some 2GB of data to a new account. He was off and running after that. I can bet you that, unless he isn't very smart, he now has private local backup of his data in case something like this happens again. And that's the right way to handle it.

Don't trust anyone with your data unless you can independently verify the ruggedness and reliability of their solution. Period. If you did not do that, engineer or "civilian", total data loss is on you, not the service.

Just to dive in a bit for the HN crowd: We base the changes that should be applied to your Dropbox on whether the client has successfully synced the previous version of the file. The server doesn't allow the client to apply changes unless the client is fully up to date. And in the case of deletions, the desktop client is only permitted to issue deletes to files that have been successfully created on disk and then later deleted.

We also have a proper support team to catch things that fall through the cracks, and if you have issues, you should reach out to them first (and as soon as you notice; their ability to fix things becomes harder the more changes you make to your account).

Again, not commenting on the above issue, but I did want to point out that we take the integrity of your data very, very seriously.