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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

#91

Post by dubya »

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.

At least on OS X, different users can be logged in to different Dropbox accounts at the same time. So you could use different user accounts for your different tasks, or work out something with shared directories. But, yeah, it's not user friendly, and it's hard to imagine Dropbox adding support to the regular client.

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

#92

Post by SquareWheel »

niggler wrote: post #85
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.

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)

That's interesting. Just random data centers you're renting space from, or are you employed there? If the former, I didn't realize you could just hand off a hard drive and be on your way.

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

#93

Post by icebraining »

mblake wrote: post #47

I strongly recommend CrashPlan for backups. They may not be marketing aggressively like Dropbox, nor will you find them mentioned N times a day on HN/similar venues, but they provide a damn good product/service. You will not have such issues with them.

Syncing and backups solve different problems, and Crashplan is not an alternative to Dropbox.

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

#94

Post by Wintamute »

sumitngupta wrote: post #66
Wintamute wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess its because by joining a Team you're being inducted into an "organisation" and then have access to all their private data. It'd be no good if every time somebody left a Team (say a freelancer) they take a copy of the organisations data with them. I'd imagine a Team account's data is encrypted too, so there's no way to decrypt it without an account that authenticates as a member of said Team ...

Doesn't really work that way though cause I could just copy everything outside of my dropbox account on my personal machine. What I had expected to happen is all the Team priv's like a bigger size limit to be removed (I already had 50gigs before though.. curious if I'll get that back or have to repay) and the shared folders to magically disappear from along side all my personal folders. It really wasn't a huge deal t…

Agreed, point taken.

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

#95

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

You can get multiple accounts running as long as you're okay without the explorer integration. http://nionsoftware.com/dbpahk/

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

#96

Post by Oompa »

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.

At this point, might as well use a competitor. Then you can have 2 different clients installed.

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

#97

Post by businessleads »

uptown wrote: post #86

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 a…

Yes. Hopefully someone from the team reads this and forwards it onward with the subject header: "Implement this now [blocker]"

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

#100

Post by niggler »

SquareWheel wrote: post #92
niggler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

That's interesting. Just random data centers you're renting space from, or are you employed there? If the former, I didn't realize you could just hand off a hard drive and be on your way.

My main business is in finance, so I rent data center space primarily in chicago, nyc area (mostly north jersey), virginia and los angeles. The minimum lease is 4RU, but I end up using a 1U server and a 1U 10/40GbE switch (the switch takes up half the depth, so i stick an ethernet router behind it), leaving 2U unused.

I had a failure once (on an iMac with a seagate 1TB hard drive that was later recalled) but since I had a local backup I didn't lose anything.

I started exploring solutions and realized that, since I had space, I could spend a few grand and get a barebones server with a few hard drives and stick it in space I'm already paying for.

This turns out to be really convenient, especially since technicians at the data center can do basic maintenance work (like hot-swapping drives) for you at a reasonable rate (generally 100-200/hr, billable in 15 minute increments; you ship them the drive and they do their magic).

In terms of absolute cost (not counting cost synergies due to leveraging the business space), each 4U lease runs from 100-500/mo with 10Mb internet (which is not bad for backing up small amounts of data; for larger amounts, shipping drives or just driving back and forth is faster and easier). Yes, dropbox is dramatically cheaper, but this way I have much more control over what's going on.

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