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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

#81

Post by nhangen »

justinschuh wrote: post #67
john-n wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they just have to remove anns access to any team based information, same as she was prior to joining?

How do you do that? Once she joins the team, you have no way of knowing if something Ann created or modified belongs to the team or to her. This is the classic problem with "taint checking." Once you mix data across boundaries you have to assume it's tainted. I agree it's a crappy situation, but I can't see what Dropbox should change, other than make it very clear how this feature works to future customers. As a one-…

They can clearly delineate between team and personal accounts, force team storage to certain directories, and/or not allow users to manage team/personal accounts with the same login.

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

#82

Post by Adirael »

rgarcia wrote: post #64
justinschuh wrote: post #17

Intermingling personal and work accounts is almost always a bad idea. I've seen colleagues get their personal accounts subpoenaed, have a firing result in loss of primary email/cell, or have really awkward communications show up in an IT audit. The overhead of maintaining separate accounts is very small (multi-profile browser, multi-account smartphone, etc.), and more than worth it given the liabilities. Beyond that,…

The overhead of maintaining separate Dropbox accounts is pretty high IMO. There's no easy way to switch between accounts on the desktop client, an I'm pretty sure there's no way to be logged in to multiple accounts.

On OS X (and Linux I guess) it can be done, but it's not easy nor intuitive. I managed to do it and you end up with two (or more) Dropbox folders and two (or more) Dropbox processes running.

EDIT: Found the link: http://maketecheasier.com/run-multiple-dropbox-accounts-in-m...

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

#83

Post by justinschuh »

rgarcia wrote: post #64
justinschuh wrote: post #17

Intermingling personal and work accounts is almost always a bad idea. I've seen colleagues get their personal accounts subpoenaed, have a firing result in loss of primary email/cell, or have really awkward communications show up in an IT audit. The overhead of maintaining separate accounts is very small (multi-profile browser, multi-account smartphone, etc.), and more than worth it given the liabilities. Beyond that,…

The overhead of maintaining separate Dropbox accounts is pretty high IMO. There's no easy way to switch between accounts on the desktop client, an I'm pretty sure there's no way to be logged in to multiple accounts.

Then segregating by systems is a better option (and the one I choose for persistent personal data other than Web profiles or email).

Of course, there's also an opportunity here for Dropbox or a competitor to offer something better. I expect there's a non-negligible demand for the ability to sync multiple accounts to different directory sets on a single client. So, maybe it's a feature that could be offered only to paying customers, to allow them to more easily separate their personal and business accounts.

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

#84

Post by Yoni1 »

mnutt wrote: post #71
xoail wrote: post #6

I can imagine why it is so hard to roll back to your old account once you leave a team. It might be best for companies to advise their employees to create separate dropbox account before joining a team.

I originally signed up into our dropbox team account with my personal account. At some point dropbox emailed me and effectively said "hey, not a great idea to have your personal account merged with your team account." They had an interface for me to select which files were personal files and split those back out into my personal account. Overall it was a pretty smooth process, since at the time I had pretty much acce…

I have never received such an email. I totally did not see it coming when my account was deleted.

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

#85

Post by niggler »

SquareWheel wrote: post #58
niggler wrote: post #13

This is why I never trust services like Dropbox. It's painful to maintain backups manually but at least I can sleep well at night knowing that the only points of failure are within my control EDIT: because I realize its not completely obvious, I keep multiple backups with my own servers sitting in different data centers. I don't see how you could trust any external service to store data.

Are the backups local? You can't prevent against a flood, fire, or theft. Are the backups off-site? You can't protect against a company going bankrupt, somebody cutting the wrong wire, or your ISP farting. Backups should be both local and off-site. Which is what Dropbox provides, actually.

I have four backups, one of which is local on a hard drive in my office, one on tapes at my house, and two sitting in drives in separate data centers. And yes driving to the data centers is a pain :/

Regardless of the level of replication it provides, it lulls you into a false sense of security (which is probably just as bad as not having backups in the first place)

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

#86

Post by uptown »

If I were Dropbox, and designing this feature, I'd have created two folders inside the master Dropbox folder. "Personal" and "Teams" then inside the "Teams" folder, I'd have created a folder for each team a person is invited to join. I realize that structure wasn't in-place when Dropbox was first created, complicating the matter - but it seems like it would have provided the cleanest way to delineate what files and access would be revoked when a user is removed from a team.

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

#87

Post by niggler »

kamjam wrote: post #79
SquareWheel wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the backups local? You can't prevent against a flood, fire, or theft. Are the backups off-site? You can't protect against a company going bankrupt, somebody cutting the wrong wire, or your ISP farting. Backups should be both local and off-site. Which is what Dropbox provides, actually.

but at least I can sleep well at night knowing that the only points of failure are within my control Hahaha, when he said that I immediately thought I'd like to see him control flood, fire, theft or "other acts of god". Like you say, backups need to be local and off-site. No single point of failure, that is the key!

The thing which would take out all of my backups is if the entire country was flooded or if there were a coordinated attack on all places (it's spread out throughout the country)

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

#88

Post by josh2600 »

barredo wrote: post #14
xoail wrote: post #6

I can imagine why it is so hard to roll back to your old account once you leave a team. It might be best for companies to advise their employees to create separate dropbox account before joining a team.

It may be due to key encryption methods?

Normally I'd agree with you, but considering Dropbox uses the same private key for all storage... I don't know.

https://www.dropbox.com/help/28/en

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

#89

Post by justinschuh »

nhangen wrote: post #81
justinschuh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do that? Once she joins the team, you have no way of knowing if something Ann created or modified belongs to the team or to her. This is the classic problem with "taint checking." Once you mix data across boundaries you have to assume it's tainted. I agree it's a crappy situation, but I can't see what Dropbox should change, other than make it very clear how this feature works to future customers. As a one-…

They can clearly delineate between team and personal accounts, force team storage to certain directories, and/or not allow users to manage team/personal accounts with the same login.

I was specifically responding to the previous comment, to explain why Dropbox can't simply revoke access to team storage files at this point (because they can't guarantee what constitutes team data). However, I'm in agreement with you that Dropbox could introduce new features to prevent this situation from happening in the first place, and had already noted as much in a different comment.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

nhangen wrote: post #81
justinschuh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do that? Once she joins the team, you have no way of knowing if something Ann created or modified belongs to the team or to her. This is the classic problem with "taint checking." Once you mix data across boundaries you have to assume it's tainted. I agree it's a crappy situation, but I can't see what Dropbox should change, other than make it very clear how this feature works to future customers. As a one-…

They can clearly delineate between team and personal accounts, force team storage to certain directories, and/or not allow users to manage team/personal accounts with the same login.

[deleted]
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