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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

#271
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…

Followup -

I've read through a lot of this thread, and I'd like to follow up with a few thoughts.

First of all, just to make it clear: Dropbox support has been GREAT. Though it took a few days because this happened on the weekend, Dropbox support did contact my colleague shortly after, and have made it clear that they will work hard to make sure everything that can be is restored. The problems with realising what is left to restore seem to be technical (again, I'm unsure of details). The support staff themselves have helped a lot. In addition, someone has reached out to me from Dropbox support because of this thread, to try and find the root cause of the problem - I hope we managed to help Dropbox find whatever it was that caused this to happen, so it doesn't happen to anyone else.

Another misconception I saw, about "Dropbox is not a backup solution":

My colleague and I both realize Dropbox is not for backup. The most important files were backed up, at least to some degree. Having said that, Dropbox is used by myself and many others as a semi-backup solution. My personal strategy is to backup the whole Dropbox folder to an external disk every few weeks, but rely on Dropbox for everything else. This is not a good backup solution, but realise that for most people, it's not "Dropbox vs. a real solution", it's "Dropbox vs. no solution at all".

I'll close with the same message I give to most people - Dropbox is brilliant, most of the time. It's not a great backup solution, but it's better than what most people do. If you're not using anything else, Dropbox is a life-changer in terms of ease-of-accessing-your-files-anywhere, and feeling secure that everything is probably backed up.

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

#272
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…

I've replied to this elsewhere, but let me reiterate here:

sean_lynch is not kidding about Dropbox's support staff. They are great, very helpful, and according to my colleague, are very serious about trying to restore everything. The issue he had was a software bug, and apparently some things are problematic to restore because of other technical reasons, but Dropbox has been very helpful.

And to make this clear - they were very helpful when this happened last week, before this thread - you don't need to write a blog post to get their help and attention.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently you've never heard of incremental backup? Oh, please. > 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. Oh, please. Again. If you don't have local backup, for a third of a year you have no backup whatsoever. Even after that, depending on the nature of your wor…

I'm assuming that you are transitioning from a different system TO the online backup. As they say, it's not a real backup until you test it, and you can't test it until it finishes.

In my particular case, no, sorry if I gave that impression. I have not seen anything yet that would compel me to use remote backup as my primary backup destination. Potential failures aside, it's slow in both directions.

My local backup strategy is a collection of external --and these days inexpensive-- hard drives as well as a large rack-mount NAS RAID array. Each of about a dozen systems has it's own local external backup drive right on the desk next to the computer. Some have dual local backup drives. We are talking in the order of $100 for a couple of terabytes today. Then, a number of systems also backup to NAS. Every so often we rotate drives for longer term storage at a fireproof external location. It'd take a lot more than Dropbox or any service having a glitch for me to loose any data.

I really don't understand folks who don't, at the very least, have one external USB backup drive on their system. On OSX you have Time Machine which is ridiculously easy to use. On Windows you can spend a few bucks and get Norton Ghost and you are good to go. All-up, probably not more than $200 per system and maybe half an hour to set it up.

Do that plus my recommendation to host your Dropbox location on a dedicated partition in order to force a copy operation during drag-and-drop (both Windows and OSX) and you will not care less about anything that happens at Dropbox or any other service.

It's about engineering, not hoping for, a system to protect your data.

As far as remote backup is concerned. I'd be interested in a system that might allow me to send them encrypted disk images on physical media for backup while providing some online access to the same.

Even with incremental backup you have to do a full backup every so often. In the case of our Windows systems running Norton Ghost, they are setup to do full backups the first day of the month and incremental backups every day after that. It's dead-easy, reliable and works great. Saved my hide a number of times.

A full backup of about 600GB happens in --I think-- about three or four hours. That's the problem with remote backup, the same full image would require a third of a year on a typical DSL connection available in the US today. Actually, it could take twice as long, two thirds of a year, because you would have to interrupt your backup in order to get your bandwidth back for use during business hours. So, if it takes you nearly a whole year to backup this much data the whole thing is just-about useless as implemented. Your incremental backups are likely to take days and you can't even consider the idea of doing full images every thirty or sixty days. That's what's broken about the concept of remote backups without even looking at the issues with potential software bugs at the various providers that could lead to data loss.

A more usable system would be one that, as I said, would receive my full images in physical media to absorb into their storage arrays for both backup and remote access purposes. If you needed to recover a few files here and there you could easily do so over a decent DSL connection. Full recovery would require physical media being shipped to you at a greater cost. Every x number of days you'd send a new full image set and go incremental after that.

The game changer here will be if we ever get to 100Gb network connectivity to the home and office. That would change the landscape in amazing ways. You could talk to remote storage probably as fast as you talk to local storage. At that point in time, having multiple redundant and geographically separate remote backup locations might very well be the most sensible approach to an organization's backup strategy. Such a system could even talk to a locally installed "backup server" in order to make sure that if connectivity is compromised in some way you still have access to your organization's data during the blackout.

The topic of backup is conceptually very but becomes really complex when you consider the multiple potential points of failure and how to deal with them.

This is why I don't consider any issues at Dropbox to be serious. I obviously don't think of them as backup. And they can't convince me to think that way no matter what they do or say. This isn't to say that I think the service is bad. Not at all. It's because I've been around and I've seen too many failures (some of my own) that I take a very careful and guarded approach to my data. And that's healthy. I use Dropbox for team communications. I almost think of it as a really neat way to "FTP" stuff around. So, instead of setting-up my own FTP server and having to manage my users and storage I can use Dropbox. No data is ever moved to Dropbox. All data is copied to Dropbox. That means that the data remains locally stored and, more importantly, locally backed-up every night. So, through engineering, failures at Dropbox or anywhere in between my DSL connection and their data centers are of no consequence whatsoever.

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

#274
post #266

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…

Critical files or not, data loss is a 100% unacceptable bug. I really doubt you will be able to convince anyone that data loss is okay. It's not. With that said, I think Dropbox is a pretty amazing service and I credit them for getting Google and Microsoft to wake up and make some similar services which are solid and different in some respects (Google Drive and SkyDrive).

Not saying anywhere that data loss is OK. Absolutely saying that data loss is a part of life, no matter what anyone says or chooses to promise.

So, you can travel two paths: One where you believe that service X can absolutely-positively not loose your data for whatever reason. Or, another, where you understand that your data can be lost at any time and for any reason by both remote service X or even your local $100 USB drive.

If you choose the first path, you are going to get stung sooner or later. And, it is my contention that blaming the service provider for your total data loss is nothing more than not wanting to admit the truth of the matter.

If you choose the second path, which could sound really paranoid but is actually very realistic, you take steps towards creating enough redundancy that a single point of failure isn't going to burn days, months or years of data. And, while no absolutes exist in this world, it doesn't take much in this day and age to have a system that will almost guarantee that your data is safe from most loss-inducing events.

I consider problems like data loss to be serious engineering problems. The difference is that I choose to look in the mirror first and blame myself first before pointing the finger at someone else.

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

#275

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…

Get Norton Ghost for your Windows setup. It works and is a no-brainer.

Once a month do a full image on both Windows and OSX systems. Save the images to another backup drive and take that backup to a safety deposit box at your bank.

If you want to be really paranoid, find a provider that offers fireproof storage for media. If you can't, go to your local storage facility and rent a small unit (maybe $30 to $75 per month, depending on where you live). Buy a fireproof safe and stick it in there. Once a month (or whatever) rotate drives through the safe.

You can also avoid the storage unit rental expense and locate a fire-proof safe at a trusted friend's or family members home or garage. Be creative.

In other words, creating a system that will virtually ensure the security of your data isn't hard or expensive --particularly when compared to the value of the data you are trying to protect.

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

#276
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…

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…

> This forces a COPY operation rather than a file MOVE if you drag-and-drop files into any Dropbox folder. Which means that everything in the Dropbox folder could be trashed tomorrow and nothing whatsoever would be lost.

This removes the main point of Dropbox, that when you edit your files they're automatically continually re-uploaded. If you're only making copies into Dropbox, you might as well just mount an SFTP server and save a bunch of money.

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

#277

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 don't have any sympathy for an engineer who uses a service and relies on it without the proper testing and qualification phase. Behaving that way is most-definitely, as I said, to be kind, "pilot error".

How the heck do you effectively test a service like Dropbox fully, without making it your full-time job (IT dept). Take the other comment on this article, where someone fired up an old machine and it wiped out his files. What test would have caught that?

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

#278
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…

I recently recycled my old notebook and took out the hard drive before recycling. Just a few days ago, I noticed videos getting added to the automatic camera uploads folder. These were not from my camera and strangely were of women undressing taken secretly outside windows. When I went to dropbox.com, it seemed that these files were added from the notebook I recycled.

I reached out to Dropbox support but got no response yet.

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

#279
post #32

Would you also be able to get all of your enemies files? or would your enemy have to share all his folders with the team?

As far as I know you can't get anyone's files if they don't explicitly share them (or put them in the Public or team folder).

Correction: It appears I'm wrong and you're right.
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