I find it outrageous that it takes a story to go public and hit HN for Dropbox support to start doing their job! And so is the pattern for many companies that grow beyond a certain threshold of celebrity. This is a sure indication for me not to trust the company.
How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795
291–296 of 296 posts
Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795
#292Another 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…
+1.
Totally agree on the "not a good backup solution". But we both (obviously) know the difference between redundancy and backup. My poor mum does not. So in the end, that's a problem, and i'm not bashing dropbox either (paid account and all, use it all the time) : their position as it stands, is a bit like the "nobody can presumably be ignorant of the law" article in french civil code (which was suppressed a few years ago), a position no commercial service whose customers are volatile should take for granted.
Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mont…
This is wildly inefficient and over kill for most people. Imaging my hard drives would require terabytes of storage when in reality my unrecoverable data is small enough to back up to Amazon for less than a dollar a month.
> This is wildly inefficient
You need to have context before you say something like that. Just ONE of our engineering machines probably takes two or three weeks to setup from scratch due to the amount of software and configuration it requires. It has some 600GB of valuable data, without counting the OS and applications installed.
So, in that context, taking the time to make multiple redundant disk images is invaluable and, yes, very efficient. If the system drive dies and no other hardware failure is present, you can be back up and running within an hour or two. That's worth money.
> over kill for most people
Absolutely true. Every situation is different.
Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795
#294Earlier 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 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 hi…
> 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?
PRECISELY!
And, if you can't reasonably expect to fully test it and verify it's reliability (of any service) then you DO NOT rely on it for critical data you cannot loose. Choosing to do so and then crying foul when you do loose data isn't engineering, it's, at best, wishful thinking.
Again, this does not mean that Dropbox --or any other service for that matter-- is bad. Not at all. It just means that you have to understand what you are walking into and, if you can't, or don't, then take steps to safeguard from the potential for external data loss, because you just don't know.
Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795
#295Earlier 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.....
What? Dropbox literally advertises themselves as a backup solution.
Yes, and we can always trust advertisements to be truthful....
If you accidentally delete a file in Dropbox on one computer, Dropbox will helpfully and immediately propagate that deletion to all of your other computers. It can be used for backup, but it's not very good at it.
Re: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? Dropbox literally advertises themselves as a backup solution.
Yes, and we can always trust advertisements to be truthful.... If you accidentally delete a file in Dropbox on one computer, Dropbox will helpfully and immediately propagate that deletion to all of your other computers. It can be used for backup, but it's not very good at it.
It strikes me as unfair to say "sure the company advertises that they can perform function x, but trusting them to actually do that makes no sense." I don't have any objection to dropbox not being a good backup solution, but I do have an objection to them advertising themselves as a good backup solution when they are not.