
How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795 - Yoni1
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1KVhGQSYE5B4dF6aNLc0hxYW0qeEVFSR8gx4pJUt4DYE
======
sean_lynch
Hey guys - Dropbox product manager here,

tl;dr: The scenario described by the OP is now less likely to occur. Since
October, individual Dropbox users are encouraged to create separate accounts
when invited to a Team and warned that Teams admins will have control over the
account.

We want individual and Team Dropbox users to have the best possible
experience. Some users want to migrate their personal accounts into a Team.
Others are much happier with separate personal and Teams accounts. We’ve been
working to make that choice much clearer for the account holder and the Teams
admin.

If users do choose to merge their personal account with a Team, things become
a bit tricky. Teams admins want better control of data within a Team, and
users want easy access to their personal stuff, but it’s not possible for us
to differentiate between Team data and personal stuff in the same account.

Here are some thoughts on the points raised by the OP:

* Better support for multiple accounts: Users can quickly switch between using personal and Teams accounts on the web today and we intend to make this better across our platforms.

* Improved messaging to Teams admins: We plan to provide better messaging to admins before disabling an account that was migrated in.

* Disabled accounts are not immediately deleted: We can work with Teams admins and users to sort out account issues and recover users’ files.

We’ve contacted the OP to help resolve his case and are sorry for any pain
this caused!

~~~
apike
> 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 one
account can sync to your computer at once" restriction makes one of your two
Dropbox accounts fairly useless.

We can only go back to Teams is when multiple accounts can sync to one
computer seamlessly. All the problems around DB for Teams (privacy and TOS
issues, personal and company data getting mixed up, weird consequences when
people leave the plan) are caused by the lack of multiple account sync.

That said, we'd be happy to just pay monthly for a shared folder that doesn't
count against users' storage limits. In the meantime, we have the company Visa
on a bunch of personal Dropbox accounts which sucks.

For personal use though Dropbox is great. Merry Chrismas!

~~~
lucisferre
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.

~~~
Gravityloss
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.

------
edanm
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 they
hadn't been synced yet!

So Dropbox decided, when the old computer was turned on, to delete 10s of
thousands of files that were in my colleague's account.

He reached out to them to help restore. It took several days (this happened on
a weekend), but they did eventually restore it. Unfortunately, since it was
difficult for them to pinpoint exactly what was the start of the event, some
files were not recovered (I'm not sure the exact reason this was difficult to
do).

I love Dropbox [1], but this was a serious blow to how much I trust them with
my files.

[1] Just look at my comment history to see - I've raved about them several
times on HN.

~~~
robomartin
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 works fine (you do
have separate system and data drives on your machines, right?).

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.

On Windows you can also do this by dragging files while holding down the RMB
and on OSX while holding down the Option key. This, however, is fraught with
issues because it is easy to forget and move something in or out of Dropbox
accidentally.

In addition to that, daily system and data backups to external media on EVERY
SYSTEM in the office ensures that even if you took a sledge-hammer to any
given machine all the data could be recovered to within a 24 hour boundary.

So, no, this is NOT a "Dropbox horror story" as far as I am concerned. At best
this is an unfortunate "pilot error" and at worst this is a sign of
incompetence.

Sorry, a little harsh there, but, as a student, I lost six months of heavy
coding work once in college. That really hurt. And that was probably the best
time and place to learn that lesson. That is all it took for me to be
completely insane about having backups of backups on anything important. Now,
may years later, you will not find any critical system in my office that is
not backed-up at least once and usually twice.

These days there's almost no excuse for loosing your work. Don't go around
blaming Dropbox, not their problem.

I am not associated with Dropbox in any way other than being just another
user.

FEATURE REQUEST: It would be very nice if Dropbox client software could have
an option to auto-magically COPY files in and out of Dropbox rather than
allowing any files to be moved. The above-mentioned hack works fine but it'd
be nice to not have to use it. Also, I'd venture to guess that most Dropbox
users don't do this, which opens them to unintended loss.

~~~
gabemart
>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 well blaming the user for not having multiple redundant backups,
but that doesn't change the fact that deleting user data without explicitly
being told to do so is one of the most egregious sins software can commit.
It's not "pilot error" when the software performs an action that should never
occur.

~~~
robomartin
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, would I have that as my sole approach to
backup?

Nope.

And this isn't me coming down on Dropbox or suggesting that they are
unreliable. I use Dropbox and I am very happy with the service. However, based
on experience gotten the hard way, I do not use it for anything that is
mission critical. The important stuff is backed-up locally, sometimes with
redundant backups.

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".

It is completely unfair to blame Dropbox for anything. This is like the idea
of cutting-and-pasting code from the Internet and trusting it with a mission-
critical aspect of your application without dissecting the code, testing it
and fully qualifying it for what it is you need it to do.

There are tons of examples of this behavior, perhaps the most common one in
the web development community is email validity verification. How many
careless developers copy a regex like this to validate their email and don't
think twice about it:

    
    
        ^[a-zA-Z0-9_.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+$
    

These things are all over the web. And most of them suck. Even some of the
most impressive ones will lead you astray.

How many engineers (and, as a result, websites) fail to test and research and
end-up with questionable solutions?

Would you blame the regex writer for this or the engineer who chose to use it
without doing any testing at all?

It doesn't matter what the regex author claims or how authoritative the
website featuring the regex might be, you have to test it before deploying it!
If you don't test, deploy and then loose customers because it is a bad regex
it is YOUR fault, not the author's. Blaming them is nonsensical.

In case you are curious, here's "the" solution: <http://isemail.info/about>

Not only is it well documented, the author offers test vectors and all of the
relevant code and references so that you can take the time to qualify the
solution.

So, yes, to be redundant, if an engineer does not do his job I am perfectly
happy calling it "pilot error" and even going as far as calling it
"incompetence".

~~~
enraged_camel
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. :)

~~~
Dylan16807
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. :)

~~~
robomartin
> He brought out the part of the HN crowd that wants things to be on-topic
> and/or useful instead of user-blaming

Right. You didn't obviously read my comments, did you? Maybe you just skimmed
them and chose to jump on the band-wagon?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963826>

I'll quote the most relevant and definitely constructive/useful parts here you
don't have to bother with the links if you don't want to. If you do, please
slow down and read it all. Then think about the idea of loosing, I don't know,
a year's worth of work and blaming someone else for it.

Here it is (reformatted because HN does not have a much-needed block-quote
markup):

    
    
        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 works fine (you do have separate 
        system and data drives on your machines, right?).
        
        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.
    

Do this TODAY and unless you have massive local loss of data you don't have to
worry about Dropbox loosing any of your data at all. Not one bit. If that
isn't constructive I don't know what it.

Then I also said:

    
    
        FEATURE REQUEST: It would be very nice if Dropbox client software 
        could have an option to auto-magically COPY files in and out of 
        Dropbox rather than allowing any files to be moved. 
        
        The above-mentioned hack works fine but it'd be nice to not have to 
        use it. Also, I'd venture to guess that most Dropbox users don't do 
        this, which opens them to unintended loss.
    

In other words, if Dropbox could implement the suggested approach EVERYONE,
engineer or not, would be spared of total data loss due to something going on
at Dropbox. Local data loss, of course, is still your responsibility.

And then, trying to understand further, I asked this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963768>

So, I'll say that overall I've been pretty constructive. If anyone adopts my
approach of storing their Dropbox folder in an unused drive they are almost
guaranteed that Dropbox can't loose their data. That is worth money.

Please point me to a link or blog post with your immediate solutions to this
problem. I'd love to compare notes. Maybe there's a better approach. Always
interested in learning. I am sure there are lots of people who, tonight, might
be interested in adopting your approach to ensuring that accidental data loss
by a remote service of any kind does not mean total data loss locally.

Thanks.

~~~
Dylan16807
I read your posts. The constructive parts are minor compared to the derail,
and you easily could have avoided the enormous argument. Also, do you really
see no downside to the fact that you have basically reimplemented manual sync
on top of dropbox? It throws out most of Dropbox's safety features just
because they aren't perfect, and throws out half the ease of use.

------
justinschuh
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, I think it's just a lot healthier to know where the
boundaries between your work and personal life are.

~~~
rgarcia
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.

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

~~~
joering2
very good point. Have to add I run both Google Drive (larger box, 5gb for
free, for personal stuff) and Drop for shared stuff never seen them
"competing" in any way.

Another thought is that on personal Google account I only keep couple
TrueCrypt containers, based on size and open read/write close them any time I
need the access. This is necessary because once you unount TC container,
entire file is affected so it needs to be shipped back to the cloud. I have
couple 50MB ones, some 100MB and some 1GB ones. I know its not the convienent
way to access your files, but I dont want Google (or drop box) to have open
access to my files.

~~~
ScottBurson
If you're going to that much trouble, you might want to look into Tahoe-LAFS:
<https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs>

------
josso
Had the exact same situation last year. Was interning at a startup for a
couple of weeks. I joined their Team-DropBox and some time after leaving the
startup, they (logically) revoked my access without either of us knowing what
it would result in.

After an email back and forth with both the DropBox-Team-support and the
startup, I got my account back in the exact same state as it was in, when my
account got revoked. I still had all of the startups stuff but it no longer
synced. As I was many GB over the limit of my free DropBox-account I deleted
all the files belonging to the startup (which of course is the right thing to
do).

I'm glad this is getting some attention, because it is clearly not working
very well as it is right now. Hopefully DropBox will make the user experience
better.

------
natural219
This seems like an issue best resolved through Dropbox support, not through HN
Soapbox support.

Edit: My main point is that I come here to read Hacker News, not Some Other
Guy's Support Problems. Treating every dropped use case as a public relations
crisis is just an exercise in getting yourself worked up for no reason. If
this is a _real_ issue that affects _multiple, real_ users, then I'm sure
Dropbox will do something about it. For now, I think it's reasonable to treat
it as an oversight until we have a response from Dropbox or more information.
Unless, of course, you're the type of person that just likes to get pissed off
at companies. In that case, I should probably find another community to read
"hacker news".

~~~
danso
Actually, I prefer this be resolved in the public arena, rather than on a
case-by-case basis for everyone who encounters this problem. If the OP is
accurate, then this is a problematic implementation detail that every
corporate user should be aware of.

~~~
natural219
I give some leeway for problems that seem to be bugs rather than intentional
features. I doubt Dropbox intended for your account to be deleted in this
scenario.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You should probably read the article before speculating. It's not even that
long. He says:

 _"In case you’re wondering, this is not a bug: it appears to be documented
(sort of)."_

------
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.

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

------
jacquesm
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 your only real solution from what I can see is to create multiple
accounts, if you don't want to give the team administrator the chance to nuke
your account if he/she feels like it. Warnings about the possible consequences
do not really solve the underlying issue and having the original team leader
have a say in the unblocking of your account doesn't help at all.

This is a feature that will need some serious work and breaks the simple
dropbox model that has gotten dropbox to where it is today.

~~~
Firehed
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.

------
areohbe
I had an identical experience. I submitted a flurry of customer service
tickets without a response. I was damn near ready to walk down to their office
since they don't provide any type 1-800 number.

Finally, I got a response from a customer support rep named Todd who explained
to me that my account had been deleted when I was removed from the Team.
Fortunately, he was able to restore my account and I weaseled an extra 5GB of
month for the trouble.

Quite the scare.

------
robomartin
I am repeating a portion of one of my comments here because I think it could
be very useful to many Dropbox users. If you implement this tonight you will,
effectively, isolate your local data from Dropbox and any accidental loss at
Dropbox will not result in total loss locally. Of course, you are responsible
for local backups. If this gets up-voted to the top of the thread it might
just help a lot of people avoid accidental loss of valuable data.

My approach for Dropbox on both Windows and OSX is to have the Dropbox folder
on a dedicated drive partition. If that is not possible, you can use a drive
that will never see development work or any data that will need to be shared
via Dropbox (business data, kid's pictures, etc.).

This forces a FILE COPY operation rather than a FILE MOVE operation when you
drag-and-drop files into any Dropbox folder. Which, in turn, means that
everything in Dropbox could be trashed tomorrow and nothing whatsoever would
be lost locally.

For years I have gotten in the habit of having at least two physical drives on
every machine: System and Data. If I don't want to create a dedicated Dropbox
partition I can usually place my Dropbox folder in the System drive and this
will trigger copy-on-drag-and-drop whenever dragging files in from the Data
drive.

If you don't have separate physical System and Data drives (highly
recommended) you can split a single drive into System and Data partitions or
simply split-off a Dropbox partition in order to achieve the same results.

    
    
        DROPBOX FEATURE REQUEST:
        It would be very nice if the Dropbox client software could have 
        an option to auto-magically COPY files in and out of Dropbox 
        rather than allowing any files to be moved.

------
adammulligan
We had this happen over the summer to someone that left and were removed from
the team. It was resolved by contacting Dropbox support, so I'm not sure why
you've not had luck with that but then it is the holiday period. Dropbox's
recent changes to how Teams Admins can manage connected accounts (which in my
opinion are a bit excessive) might help with this process. Their ToS explains
these changes but an email they sent round in October explains it better:
[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/39bd6ae2-a0b6-41a9-87a4...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/39bd6ae2-a0b6-41a9-87a4-621c9edf9f90/391970b0b9683207a786f3e2f8c1afea)

------
kmfrk
Paging Google and Microsoft. Now's as good a time as any to promote your cloud
storage services and help a guy out.

~~~
aspir
This very reason is actually why my company is migrating to Box. No one I work
with is the type to jump ship on a company just for one feature, but this is a
major liability. I'll still keep DB for my personal use, but my company had
~30 TB of Dropbox storage at the time.

Our account is a blip on their revenue radar, but if Dropbox wants to become a
a truly monumental company, they'll need to do something to fix this. Being
small business friendly isn't the same as "Enterprise friendly," but Dropbox
is neither at this point.

------
keithpeter
So when joining a startup (or anything else) that uses Dropbox for Teams, you
make a new account just for that project? Perhaps startups (and other
entities) that require dropbox membership might make that suggestion?

~~~
Yoni1
I don't think making a new account just for your Teams access is very
convenient. The desktop application is only associated with 1 account at a
time.

So (until Dropbox changes something) there does not seem to be a good solution
to your question.

~~~
geofft
Have your startup get you a separate computer. Not mixing work and personal
life extends to not doing work development on your personal machine or vice
versa.

~~~
Yoni1
That's good personal advice - but it's not really a solution to the problem
for everyone.

~~~
justinschuh
It's really the only solution if you want to maintain some degree of personal
privacy, and don't want to incur all your employer's liability on your
personal account (and vice versa).

~~~
kamjam
That's largely going to depend on where you live and the laws of that place.
Remember, it's a worldwide market these days!

------
xoail
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.

~~~
Yoni1
If it's hard it's due to bad design. It could've been possible.

~~~
mblake
Bad design most likely. Looking more carefully at the link in the initial
email they sent you: 'confirm_migrate?'. This almost gives it away.

~~~
Yoni1
I didn't even notice that until now, and definitely not when I originally
clicked the link :)

~~~
mblake
I feel for you. Internet hugs!

------
j45
This should be better communicated when upgrading your account to join a team.
Individuals place a lot of blind trust in cloud providers with their life's
data.

This would be completely unacceptable, ever to risk my data in any way and I'm
a little surprised Dropbox doesn't realize they don't have a business without
trust that their data will always be ok.

------
lightcatcher
I had the exact same issues as the OP (interned at a startup and used personal
Dropbox account for Dropbox for teams), but I was aware of the potential issue
upon leaving the Dropbox for Teams account and emailed Dropbox support and
everything worked out fine.

------
pasbesoin
I am amazed -- but not surprised -- that you would role out the "Team" feature
without thinking through -- and solving -- such scenarios.

It seems to be a small minority of people who really do so. And often, they
are ignored or even berated, and "slow-tracked", until the shit hits the fan.

If the account is accurate, I have no sympathy for Dropbox on this. This was
entirely predictable, and any amount of effective due diligence would have
mitigated it.

P.S. Of course, it also goes to say to the "victim": Dropbox is
_synchronization_ , not _back-up_. You need to back your shit up to a medium
over which _you_ have control. (Said control including taking it off-line
where no online activity can affect it.)

------
sumitngupta
I've actually been through this twice now (its currently disabled from leaving
the second company's Team account, I should have known better but I thought
they would have "fixed" the issue by now). First time around they just needed
my the guy at my last company to approve it being re-enabled (not sure why)...
and waiting for that whole flow to start up again for this second time. I
should have known better this time :( I really just don't get the reasoning
behind the feature being implemented this way. I would imagine Dropbox would
want to discourage signing up for multiple accounts just cause ones personal
and one's work.

~~~
Wintamute
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 ...

~~~
sumitngupta
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 this time around as I learned now to store all my
password files and stuff through DB anymore as that boned me pretty hard the
last time around.

~~~
Wintamute
Agreed, point taken.

------
fnordfnordfnord
At the risk of stating the obvious, that invitation email ought to be a bit
more informative. Maybe, there ought to be an option to create a new account
for use with that team.

~~~
Oompa
What's sad is that the Dropbox desktop client doesn't support multiple
accounts easily, so then you might as well use a different service, so you can
have 2 clients installed that sync automatically.

------
lucian1900
If it's not possible to un-entangle accounts, then Dropbox needs to support
being logged in to several accounts, much like Google does.

Also, to not delete user's data.

~~~
8ig8
I assume this would work against their model of giving away limited free
space. With multiple account access, a user could sign up with multiple email
addresses and essentially get unlimited storage for free.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
That's trivial to solve. Only allow a single free account to be signed into.
Multiple accounts are required to be team accounts.

------
rdl
I'd be really surprised if Dropbox didn't have a way to revert this (and to
punish the Dropbox for Teams account creator, if identifiable).

~~~
DanBC
Revert this how?

Ann has an individual account. She joins a team. She leaves the team, and Bob
(the team account owner) revokes her access. Dropbox deletes all her accounts.

What can dropbox do here; set Ann back as a member of that team? Bob (paying a
lot of money) is not happy with that.

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

~~~
justinschuh
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-time thing, they could maybe get a PR win
by helping this guy recover his data (if possible). However, that's not
scalable, or a precedent they'd want to continue forward.

~~~
nhangen
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.

~~~
justinschuh
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.

------
lsc
Lesson here is that the best practice for a backup system is to make it so
that two (or more) different entities need to screw it up at the same time for
you to lose data. Because entities do screw it up.

Note, the hardest part, here? is that you are one of the entities. It's very
hard to design a system where a hostile entity compromising owner credentials
can't lead to data loss.

Best I could think of would be a service that keeps your data available in
read only mode for a certain period of time (for which you pre-pay) - but I
don't know of anyone offering such a service.

I suppose a stack of blue-rays in a safety deposit box would come dang close;
I mean, sure if /all/ of your credentials were compromised you are still
screwed, but if they can impersonate you in person at the bank... well, that's
a worse compromise than most people plan for.

------
mblake
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.

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

------
NuZZ
Haven't seen it mentioned here; but I am in the process of switching to Cubby
from DropBox. It's new. Seeing as how DropBox's most requested features are
mostly ignored on their "VoteBox" part of their site, I noticed disgruntled
users on said site suggesting Cubby.

Sync any folder, security keys, don't have to use the cloud, better data
retention, more space, better desktop app, more features in general.

<https://www.cubby.com/>

Yeah, almost seems too good to be true. If anyone uses it perhaps they can
share some downsides.

------
Paul12345534
Local mirrored copies of all files on separate hard drive. Bank safety deposit
box with bluray discs of files for long-term storage, things that rarely
change (my photography work alone is several TBs). Rapidshare (using 3TB right
now for the same $8 a month, I accept it's not the most reliable place if a
Megaupload situation ever happened). Skydrive for my important documents and
programming work. Small program I wrote makes the Rapidshare/Skydrive backups
incremental and encrypted on a regular schedule.

------
constantx
Had this happened to me a while back. They don't completely "delete" your
stuff, just disable access to it. After contact support and the admin of the
account, everything is sugar again.

------
Volpe
As a dropbox team admin for my company, I recently removed a member from the
team. It explains in bright red writing (from memory) that it will remove the
members entire dropbox account.

I remember, because I contacted the team member, and got him to back
everything up before I procceded.

I then contacted Dropbox support, to explain how stupid this was...

My point is, that admin should have some accountability, ignoring big red
writing is usually a bad idea.

------
niggler
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.

~~~
SquareWheel
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.

~~~
niggler
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)

~~~
SquareWheel
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.

~~~
niggler
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.

~~~
SquareWheel
Sounds like a good setup. Thanks for the details.

------
rawb92
almost $800 to slightly inconvience them isn't worth it, now if it deleted
every single file of theirs then I have a few people I would do this to!

It does seem silly that they can't simply remove you from a team without
deleting your account, I can't think of anything that would stop them from
being able to do that other than not having the time or motivation to
implement the feature.

------
scottschulthess
Who joins a team account from your worst enemy?

------
nigelsampson
I've run into this problem as well, for me the easiest solution was to run
Skydrive for personal and Dropbox teams for work.

------
znowi
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.

------
joering2
I dont get it why someone would use Dropbox in the first place? Google Drive
is out for a long enough and it never failed for me; it gives 150% more
capacity for free (5gb) and its made by folks @ Google (hello?). Just don't
see any reason why to use Dropbox...

~~~
CamperBob2
Google has a longstanding history of severe corporate ADHD. I think a given
startup's odds of long-term survival are better than the odds of a similar
non-cord initiative surviving equally long inside Google.

------
tapsboy
Why has dropbox not considered a github style context changing feature till
now. I am surprised.

------
georgelawrence
Don't worry... Guido will fix everything next month ;-)

------
toddmorey
This happened to me, too. Same situation. They were able to fix it after some
discussion, but it was pretty crazy that it's set up this way.

------
smellyfinger
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?

~~~
Yoni1
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).

~~~
Yoni1
Correction: It appears I'm wrong and you're right.

------
chayesfss
Is it possible to see what clients use this service like you can with other
services (dropbox.com/company or whatever)

------
TommyDANGerous
Haha, great read. Still love Dropbox though. Great and fast responses, way to
go Dropbox. Keep up the good work.

------
benjlang
Yoni - what's your Twitter handle? Interested to see first hand what Dropbox
responded.

------
matthuggins
Mirror? Getting a Google Drive error: "The app is currently unreachable."

~~~
rcchen
<http://pastebin.com/bRBkXCGG>

~~~
Yoni1
Thanks :)

------
namank
WOAH! This might be happening to me in about two weeks!

~~~
rocky1138
Come up with a battle plan and share it with HN if it works, please.

------
benjlang
Yoni - what's your twitter handle?

------
lucian303
If it's not in their TOS (and the FAQ linked to wouldn't count) then you have
a great case of willful negligence against both Dropbox and your previous
employer. I'd take it to small claims court and sue them for the time and
money you spent trying to recover your account.

