Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 296 posts

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

#211

Post by robomartin »

enraged_camel wrote: post #198
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…

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. :)

It's OK. My data is safe. I suspect yours is as well.

Mark Twain: A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

I love done that. I've held a number of cats by the tail over the years. And, he is right, sometimes you don't learn until you have claws painfully sunk into your skin, no-matter what anyone around you might say.

And, I love Dropbox. It's a great service. As far as I am concerned, there's nothing wrong with it. If you own your data Dropbox could go out of business tomorrow and you would not care.

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

#212

Post by Firehed »

jacquesm wrote: post #204

Dropbox does one thing and does one thing well. They've worked really hard to keep feature creep to a minimum. Dropbox for teams is a feature that adds so much over and beyond the initial KISS offering that the cracks in the 'just one folder' model are beginning to show. Ideally you'd have two or more folders marked as dropbox folders where you could associate each individual folder with the team or not at will. Now…

Not just that, but cleaning up (er, creating) multi-sign-on support. We've fortunately decided to only use our company domain emails for Dropbox for Teams, but because I can only be logged in to one Dropbox account at a time, it prevents me from using my personal account on my work computer. Some may argue that's a good thing, but I don't particularly care about that clean personal/work separation[1] for the stuff in my personal Dropbox account.

Arguably by putting the "for teams" content in a completely isolated directory it solves the need for being able to sign in to multiple accounts at once[2], but there's still going to be some weirdness if my personal account is added as a team member of a work directory, since then you'd either start getting work stuff on personal machines or have to do per-device authorization which will be a nightmare for team administrators of even a dozen or so people.

The whole thing gets really nasty when you realize that DBFT adds something like 50-100GB/member. I don't need giant photoshop files from our marketing or design teams eating up all the free space on my tiny little Macbook Air. My dropbox status window says I have over 3TB free (yes, terabytes); by default, I have to micromanage selective folder syncing to prevent my hard drive from being immediately filled after signing in. There seems to be a little disconnect between "team" and "company" in how this is used, unlike say Github where it's just people in a relatively ad-hoc group.

[1] I don't go the other way (work files on a personal machine) however. It would create numerous liabilities in terms of file security and IP ownership, among other areas. Except for my iPhone, I won't even open work email on any of my personal devices. There's just too much potentially-sensitive material, and I don't care for the inconvenience of heavily locking down my personal machines to deal with that when they don't really have anything important.

[2] and avoids the possible problem of people signing up under multiple email addresses for free space.

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

#213

Post by arashf »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #209
crazygringo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience Dropbox won't sync if the local system time is too far off. Makes no sense IMO, but that seems to be how it works.

that's just SSL cert validation :-)

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

#214

Post by Dylan16807 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #198
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…

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. :)

He put in a huge amount of effort to derail the discussion. Pretend that where it says "wasn't able to recover everything" the post said "wasn't able to recover everything from Dropbox, and had to resort to getting external backups mailed to him". Same terrible problem on Dropbox's end, suddenly no need to waste pages arguing about 'responsibility'.

He brought out the part of the HN crowd that wants things to be on-topic and/or useful instead of user-blaming. :)

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

#215

Post by Gravityloss »

lucisferre wrote: post #192
apike wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've found that shared folders mostly just don't work - others can't see the files I put in there - or at least most of them. I don't know what else I could do. (If I share one file with a direct email link generation, that works, so the files certainly are there.)

Maybe I ran into some undocumented antipiracy feature as they were self made AVCHD videos of a few minutes length.

Google drive on the other hand just works.

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

#216

Post by robomartin »

gabemart wrote: post #206
jacquesm wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

>Personal responsibility and the acceptance thereof is a major item on the checklist 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 proce…

> Independently, softwares and services which handle user-created files should never, ever delete them without a direct instruction from the user.

Show me a business that is willing to offer you that guarantee and I'll show you a business that is out of business.

What if there's a fire? Or malicious destruction? Or massive hardware failure?

Anyhow, the only people who would down-vote some of the comments I am making are those who have never suffered the pain and agony of data loss. If you've ever been in those shoes you know, without an iota of doubt, that what I am saying is 100% on point.

There's nothing wrong with Dropbox. The problem is in how naively people are choosing to use the service.

Could they be better? Of course. Would I still have my own redundant backups and recommend that Dropbox users do the same and fully understand the service. Absolutely!

Personal responsibility is a bitch. It's much easier to blame someone else. Guess what? Blaming someone else for your failings will not make things right or bring back your data.

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

#217

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

>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 for the initial sync is perfectly acceptable.

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

#218

Post by JohnHaugeland »

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…

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, as a way to step around owning up.

I think you should consider this tone very carefully.

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

#219

Post by rogerbinns »

rpearl wrote: post #173
rogerbinns wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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.

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.

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

#220

Post by SoftwareMaven »

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 use Dropbox for synching only. I don't consider it a backup. For backup, my solution is redundant:

I have a local Time Machine backup that is going continually. This allows me to quickly recover from most problems. However, if my house ever blew up, it wouldn't be sufficient, so in addition...

I have a Backblaze account. $5/month for everything on one computer, which is fine because Dropbox syncs my laptop to that computer. That backup runs continuously and keeps 30 days history (so if I delete a file and need to get it back, I can). Since I only care about disaster recovery here, if my house does blow up, they'll send me a hard drive with everything for around $100.

The combination means I feel pretty comfortable. I just hope my house doesn't blow up!

Post reply on HN