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bell-cot
throw10920
> plus their own log files covering those deletions
This is the really unreasonable part. Some convoluted internal process that ends up accidentally flagging a file as suspicious and then deleting it is bad enough, but still partially understandable if you're very conservative with assigning blame. But deleting the log files? Either extreme technical incompetence or plain malice.
bell-cot
Our assumption: Log files of everything still existed, but were flagged "Hide & Never Admit To, per $SecretReason".
deanCommie
Hanlon's razor:
At dropbox's scale, guaranteed logfile durability is expensive, and retaining them indefinitely even more so.
They either got auto-deleted or they were never there in the first place.
rajup
Sadly this story could have happened with any big cloud provider.
Ideally there would be more regulation around the ability of big tech companies to shutdown your digital life through a mindless algorithm, with close to zero recourse. Unfortunately I don’t see anything happening unless someone really powerful (say a member of Congress) gets bitten by this.
GuB-42
I don't think it is something that needs legislation.
But it definitely needs more publicity. And if there is something that will bring down "big tech", I think that's it.
"cloud providers" should be treated like something that can fail. We already don't trust hard drives, that's why we have RAID, we don't even trust RAID arrays, that's why we have backups, and we don't trust the place where backups are stored, that's why we have off-site backups. Dropbox (and Microsoft, Google, etc...) is also not to be trusted, just like your hard drive can crash or your servers can catch fire, Dropbox can delete your data. It is not the same mechanism (one is a chemical reaction, the other is a mindless algorithm), but the end result is the same: you lose your data.
But once you take that into account, the value proposition of big cloud providers takes a hit. Often, big companies justify the premium price they ask with reliability. I mean, no one expects companies like Microsoft to go bankrupt anytime soon, and they certainly know about backups and redundancy, but what's the point if all it takes for your data to disappear is an artificial brain fart. Suddenly, the server in your basement doesn't look so bad in comparison, and neither are the smaller companies that actually have people you can talk to.
sib
>> "cloud providers" should be treated like something that can fail. We already don't trust hard drives, that's why we have RAID
"Can fail" is certainly true, just like a hard drive can fail.
But we'd all be rightfully upset if someone at Western Digital decided to some to our home and proactively delete files from our HDD.
Teever
Something like this definitely needs legislation.
The whole concept of ToS needs to be overhauled with vast amounts of practice that is currently considered acceptable thrown right in the fucking trash.
The idea that companies can change their ToS on a whim every day and push out walls of text that no one reads and everyone clicks through is insane. Why can't we modify the terms of agreement?
Let's start with that law, all ToS interfaces must include an interface for users to upload their own modifications and companies must have a human interpret them (not some shitty 'ai') and decide to accept them in a reasonable time frame, and if the company chooses to decline them they cannot ban the user from the service for this, the last ToS that they accepted must be the one that their interaction with the customer is conducted under. The entire process must be auditable by other by both sides and a neutral third party.
I'm sick of big companies hiding behind an opaque wall of bullshit, if this was a small town dispute between two individuals this would be transparently settled one way or another and that's exactly how it should be on the internet.
The laws haven't kept up with the times, and they haven't kept up with the creative ways people with money try to fuck over those without.
sofixa
> I don't think it is something that needs legislation
Why not?
indigochill
The solution to this in my mind is self-hosting. Yes, right now that's the exclusive domain of tech nerds, but in theory there's no reason that an open source project can't come along and make this relatively easy for non-techies to set up for themselves (in a similar way to how, say, Squarespace made website creation easy).
I think the real hurdle in adoption would be that most non-techies don't even register their dependence on big cloud providers as a problem yet. But I expect the day is coming. Similar to how Mastodon saw an influx of Twitter users when Musk announced he was intending to buy Twitter.
tarboreus
SyncThing is actually really good. The main issue is integrations. A lot of mobile apps work with Dropbox but not with decent FOSS alternatives.
charlie0
Filecoin and IPFS?
bell-cot
+1...but don't expect "$VVVIP bitten by this..." to change anything. Big cloud providers doubtless have Secret VIP Customer Service departments, to avoid that problem.
dubswithus
I've got 776 gigs of pirated TV in my Dropbox. Am I in danger?
rolph
in a number of ways yes, depending on the amount of 3rd party attention devoted to the files, in my neck of the woods a 1 terabyte drive is worth ~ 100$
mc32
I think Box's KeySafe[1] prevents their ability to see into your files --not entirely sure, but according to their description of it, seems so.
Hendrikto
Surely a Dropbox upload wasn‘t the only version you had. Couldn‘t you restore easily?
hammyhavoc
You'd be amazed that folks even today misunderstand it to be a 'backup' instead of a sync service.
bin_bash
Dropbox calls it a backup service:
chrisseaton
It is a backup. Any copy of your data is a backup. It just shouldn't be the only backup (obviously, like any backup.)
TheRealDunkirk
To be fair, they didn't say it was the only copy they had.
mavhc
Aren't the files still on the computers that Dropbox synced to?
Deleting files from Dropbox's servers, that's fine, deleting files from my computer that I uploaded to Dropbox, that's bad.
mdavidn
> Aren't the files still on the computers that Dropbox synced to?
Not if “smart sync” is enabled on the folder.
https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/...
MilaM
Files that are stored in iCloud Documents will also not be backed up by Time Machine. Huge mess if you ask me. I therefore don't use iCloud Cloud storage anymore. It's just too complicated to reason about.
Source: https://eclecticlight.co/2022/02/21/can-you-back-up-icloud-d...
protomyth
OneDrive recently switched to cloud stored and you have to jump through hoops to make it so you have a local copy of everything.
gwbas1c
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jkaplowitz
As per the other commenter's edit, this didn't affect source code.
UweSchmidt
This is an inevitable consequence from the push to make cloud companies responsible for the content they host. Analyzing all of it can only be automated; automation will deliver weird false positives.
ashleyn
This chilling effect is already going on. I'm writing a science-fiction thriller and took most of my notes off Google Drive out of fear that they would misconstrue them as political extremism. If AI is being used for content moderation then this only raises the likelihood that a false positive is identified, devoid of any context, and I lose my entire Google account to an uncontactable bureaucracy.
I made a Nextcloud to host my references and storywriting notes. Nextcloud is horribly buggy, difficult to maintain, and has very poor user experience compared to Google Drive - but at least I don't need to worry about my entire digital life being auto-terminated by an overzealous robot, with no reasonable appeal process beyond "knowing enough people to make a stink".
nonameiguess
Humans can have just as overzealous a response as those robots. In my senior year of high school, I developed a bit of a fascination with historical serial killers and turned in an assignment for AP English exploring the mindset, and my teacher promptly turned it over to the school's counseling service, and I was forced to see a counselor, questioned about violent tendencies, given a 0 on the assignment, and a C in the class. This was the same semester as the Columbine shooting, so I guess schools were on edge about students who might want to kill other students, which I definitely did not want to do, but apparently writing about people who want to do that kind of thing can easily be misconstrued as autobiographical. I almost didn't graduate because of that. Heck, one of my friends was expelled for possessing a switchblade comb because things that looked like weapons were banned. There was no appeal process for these infractions, either.
Honestly, that seems like a feature of many administrative processes, even those administered by government. So far, in the process of trying to become licensed as adoptive parents, my wife and I have been dropped twice now by licensing agencies, without any explanation of why or recourse to appeal the decision. As far as I can tell, the only way to gain the right to appeal a decision is to actually be convicted of a crime.
FearlessNebula
If anyone doesn't want to deal with hosting Nextcloud, Cryptpad.fr is a free option and in my experience the only issue is it's a bit slow and doesn't work nearly as well on mobile devices as G Suite
ByThyGrace
So why do you need all your writing notes to be on the cloud? Using multiple devices for work? An editor's request/requirement?
em-bee
always keep a copy outside of your home. my own writing is replicated on almost every device i have. it's the most valuable to me. more so even than photos which are just memories.
slfnflctd
I encountered a false positive where a pure text file made up of personal log entries was flagged by antivirus as malicious, and it started fighting me on trying to restore the file from a backup as well. Fortunately, I was eventually able to recover it, although I've forgotten how.
Probably my most memorable lesson in unexpected failure modes for complex, automated software.
Crontab
Anything held on anyone else's computer is a candidate for scanning or pilfering. That's why I am a fan of encrypted backups.
bjt2n3904
Amazing that the Internet culture that vehemently opposed DRM and created things like bit torrent so quickly lined up behind algorithmic content moderation.
TheRealDunkirk
IMHO, the problem started when we all jumped on Gmail, knowing that there was no support, and if it broke, we got to keep both pieces. I watched my wife's account get taken over in real time a couple years ago. Ten years of personal and financial info, now in the hands of God-knows-who for God-knows-why. I simply deleted the account from her devices, and moved on. There was nothing I could do, and no one I could complain to about it. The WILD success of this model has led everyone else to do the same thing.
lostgame
>> IMHO, the problem started when we all jumped on Gmail, knowing that there was no support
Back when Gmail was invite-only, most people used Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, which would offer a base level of (I think) about 50-100MB of storage at the time. If you wanted more storage; you'd have to pay for your email service - an idea I don't think anyone born past 2000 has even heard of.
Gmail came along, and suddenly offers us 1 GB of free storage, for free. This was around a quarter the size of some people's hard drives at this point.
Of course we didn't care if there was no support!
Are you kidding? I don't think Hotmail had support, either - (maybe I'm wrong?) - even if you paid for it; but here Google was offering a substantial value for anyone using any other existing mainstream email service, immediately.
They even had STMP and IMAP support, meaning you could use whatever client you preferred. Back in the day most people used computer-side email clients and had local backups of emails anyway - so if one went missing from Google's side it wouldn't be so bad.
There's a reason Gmail is still one of Google's strongest and unusually longest-lasting product of Google's. There's less reason now - but my God, when it was introduced it was an honest-to-God mindfuck as to how they were offering such a large amount of space and features for nothing.
benglish11
I think that internet (that opposed drm) and this one are very different. The anti drm movement was more of a popular movement and this one is a reaction by large corporations to new legal regulations (or threats of more regulations). It’s hard to even think of those as the same “culture”
rakoo
The Internet culture fighting DRM and sharing of information is decidedly not the same group of people wishing for algorithmic content moderation
bil7
fans of bittorrent and fans of services with auto content moderation share at least one common factor: they are free to use. Many people are not motivated much further than keeping their hard earned cash.
rad_gruchalski
It’s a forced legislation in most places. Flagging is understandable, automatic removal with no way to recover is an awful practice.
fluoridation
Yes, those two sets of people are one and the same.
temp8964
But do they have to delete the flagged account directly?
Also, can't they distinguish a spam account from a legit account based on the account history? I can't see why this is a difficult problem to solve.
malux85
Actual LOL
Have you ever tried to fight spam at scale? It’s trivial to block the 50% of obvious spam accounts, but we are at the stage of humanity where the activity of very dumb humans and the activity of very clever bots, EASILY overlap. A lot.
Bots will use proxies that use residential IPs, they will maintain session info (Cookies, User-Agents, etc) they will move the mouse and introduce jitter, their access patterns aren’t random but are engineered to work in the day night hours that match the geo-data of the IP they are using. They solve captchas, at the same rate that humans do (time, error rate)
Some human accounts look like bots. They sign up and upload a couple of files which immediately get high traffic. They use NordVPN so their public IP is shared by thousands of “known bots”, their access patterns are weird and unpredictable.
Yes, you can use machine learning to try and identify theses but then you end up with false positives and real people having problems like the poster above.
And on top of all that, bots are constantly subverting detection so whatever solution you have now won’t work next week.
temp8964
How many spammers invest months / years to upload and modify content to fake legitimate user accounts?
raxxorraxor
Well, European countries produce "studies" that say hate is effectively reduced and overblocking does not happen. Germany was leading here and the digital services act will copy the crap. No real relevant social networks in Europe and it only applies to platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but it is still silly legislation with negative effects.
katmannthree
Dropbox doesn't have any functioning contact points. I cancelled my yearly subscription a month ago the day after it renewed, they cancelled my premium benefits immediately but never send the $120 refund that the cancellation page said I'd get. Tried contacting them from their website contact page, nothing. Tried tweeting at their support account, nothing. I'm half tempted to try to get my bank to do a chargeback.
It's sad, I used to really like dropbox but now they just suck.
InitialLastName
> I'm half tempted to try to get my bank to do a chargeback.
Do it. I guarantee Dropbox cares far more about their relationship with the credit card processors than it does about their relationship with you (who just terminated your relationship with them), so maybe if enough people do chargebacks to resolve their problems it will incentivize them to make their system work correctly.
mullen
And make sure to explain the story to the Bank/Credit Card company as accurately as possible. You paid X for Y amount of service but want to cancel after Y amount of service and instead Dropbox just cancelled you right away and won't refund you the difference.
ratww
At this point half of the internet doesn't seem to have functioning contact points.
I sometimes wonder if I could do chargebacks for almost everything I buy online, since some companies don't even bother to answer the credit card company or PayPal to dispute or authorise the chargeback.
_jal
I've gotten much quicker with chargebacks in this situation. Companies that go out of their way to insulate themselves from their customers leave you little other alternative.
Dropbox is acting no different than any other scammer here, and there's a limit to how much time I'm going to waste on being polite. Somehow it is always a "mistake", and somehow those "mistakes" always involve money flows in the same direction.
djbusby
Do the charge-back! There is no other course if you want that money back.
remram
This is also exactly what it's for, getting your money back for services not provided after attempts to contact support fail.
PascLeRasc
They technically have fine print that they don't ever give refunds for unused time - https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/cancellations-refu.... When this happened to me I asked the support chat for confirmation in writing so I could file it with a chargeback, and they found a way to refund me without one.
kurupt213
You need to do the chargeback
djbusby
Never would have happened if you just used FTP like Brandon said
batuhandirek
Do you have this in your bookmarks? Super cool you could just pull this off of your memory and have a link to it!
djbusby
HN search. I knew the terms. I remember upvoting that comment when it posted. I still don't use Dropbox. (sshfs backed on a zfs server (hosted by rsync.net))
xeromal
This is a pretty popular post to link to when it comes to feedback for a new app you're building. Another fun one is the slashdot posts when the first ipod came out.
rkuykendall-com
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
undersuit
There is someone suggesting in the Twitter thread to use an FTP server too.
_xoo
On a recent story there was a similar reference to this comment.
hs86
If he uses it for work, and clearly, most shared links he creates are of copyrighted media content, how would this work in practice? Does Google Drive/Dropbox have some flag for "creator" accounts?
xnorswap
Copyright is automatic, most things that most people create are copyrighted media content.
The problem is that we've ended up with a situation where copyright is automatically:
1. Assumed to be owned by media-corporations
2. Assumed to be wilfully violated by users
3. Assumed to be that deletion is the correct resolution
4. Assumed the USA to be the jurisdiction of the copyright holder and user
All of these assumptions should be challenged. This isn't a technical challenge, it's a legal one.
Special treatment for VIPs isn't the answer.
LinuxBender
I don't have an answer for your question but from experience I can say that anecdotally most well known creators have their own infrastructure or outsourced infrastructure and legal teams. Content will not be deleted unless there are repeated egregious violations and complete refusal to remediate violations of the contract that their legal team agreed to. By contact I do not mean some thing that someone clickity-clicked their way through. I mean a contract that went back and forth between legal teams and signed/recorded by a public notary. In such cases deletions would always be done by a human. I have no idea why the Rick and Morty creators did not have such an agreement in place with Dropbox to prevent this scenario or if Dropbox even supports this model.
As a funny side story, at least I think it is funny... I used to manage the backend servers for Atari. The "Internet Police" used bots to send take down notices for copyright violations and emailed us saying to take down Atari's software because it was a copyright violation. Atari was our customer. This should have been obvious as the FCrDNS had their domain name in the PTR records. I found it hilarious but also saw how that was a bit of foreshadowing as to how the internet would devolve.
smolder
Rick and Morty isn't the only thing Justin works on. Likely this was his personal account and not something used specifically for that show. There's no mention of the show in his tweet.
kmeisthax
Assuming this is copyright related... probably not. The only way this could be done in practice would be for Justin Roiland/Williams Street/Rick & Morty LLC/Cartoon Network/Warner Bros. to legally indemnify Dropbox - as in, agree to pay all of Dropbox's legal fees and damages if they get sued for copyright infringement outside of their DMCA 512 safe harbor. This is entirely impractical for an individual to pull off, and Dropbox might not even have a copyright indemnity policy for corporate clients.
Also, if anyone actually has a bone to pick with Dropbox over shared links, this is probably a very bad idea, because it would just be opening WB's far larger pockets to whoever Justin is pirating content from. There is no actual legal provision for "creators" to get away with copyright infringement that we cannot.
And let me be perfectly clear: It is not legal to copy media over any kind of file share, even privately within an organization, unless you have a copyright license, which they clearly don't. Censorship[0] on-demand in exchange for liability limitation is the world that all these media companies chose to live in. They screamed their heads off about the harms of noncommercial piracy over the Internet while also, apparently, pirating enough content internally that Dropbox needed to shut off their account. If they want their account back, then either pay for a license to every video file on that share or publicly lobby Congress to legalize file sharing.
Or this could have nothing to do with copyright and some internal spam filter just shat the bed very badly. The original linked tweet didn't clarify anything and Justin might just not even have anything to clarify with. I really hate how modern tech companies are allowed to do summary executions of accounts like this with no explanation.
[0] I am willing to accept the "copyright infringement is not speech" argument, which SCOTUS also does, but DMCA 512 still allows censorship of novel speech because the counternotice procedure is laughably inadequate.
towaway15463
bet you a dollar that they were taken down because they were sharing links to content they had created for Rick and Morty etc and Dropbox’s dumb algo just didn’t know that they were the creators of that content.
kmeisthax
Dropbox only hashes files that they've gotten DMCA takedowns for. So WB told Dropbox "do not allow people to share Rick & Morty", and then got angry because they couldn't share Rick & Morty internally. This isn't a false positive, the algorithm is working exactly as intended.
heretogetout
If that's the case surely they could have told him that was the reason. Otherwise we're talking about software engineers deliberately writing code to waste other people's time and make the Dropbox product look worse to their customers or prospective customers.
thrdbndndn
Obviously they said so in TOS, but it's pretty rare to get terminated due to copyrighted material alone.
At least not until you mass-share (maybe the case here?) them.
kixiQu
Isn't it pointless to discuss this without knowing more about the communications that happened?
barnabee
Not really. It’s unacceptable for Dropbox to know/inspect what content you’re storing, scan it for anything without you actively requesting they do so, and certainly to delete it.
This behaviour and any terms of service that allow it should be illegal. The fact that it goes on constantly is a scandal.
sushid
There are clearly situations where it's deemed acceptable. Dropbox cooperates with law enforcement to remove illegal images of minors, for instance.
smaryjerry
I kind of get both sides. They shouldn’t scan personal files at all but then again Dropbox files are also shareable and is kind of like YouTube in that way. So if in this case a guy has copyrighted content, which they own the copyright for, and are sharing copies of copyrighted content, how can an algorithm know it’s not some random person. It’s much more likely not to be the copyright owner than to be it. What’s the worst part imo is that there’s no recourse, no appeal process, no one to talk to for the mistake - except it seems via twitter.
sleepybrett
at worst they should scan files that are shared then.
slightwinder
That depends on whether you share the content. In this case, there might be legal requirements for checking on the shared content, so dropbox can't avoid it.
But they might do something about how they handle this. Especially if it's an likely older account. Dropbox has many creators as customers. They should have more experience to handle this gracefully.
kixiQu
How do you know that this had anything to do with inspection or scanning?
tofuahdude
Why shouldn't they be able to know/inspect/scan the content that they are physically storing?
I'm genuinely curious the logic.
From my perspective, they're a company providing a service and can determine the terms upon which they'll provide it. You don't have to use them if you don't like it.
barnabee
Right to privacy. Companies have never had carte blanche to create any terms they like. Many types of contractual agreement are illegal or unenforceable.
Your landlord can’t just turn up and start rifling through your stuff, and the owner of your rented disk space shouldn’t be allowed to do the digital equivalent.
riffraff
hey, this is the internet, a headline is enough to get your pitchforks out and battle your favorite strawman.
Jordrok
That's part of the problem itself. In most cases there ARE no communications about why an account was terminated, and it's impossible to get any unless you have enough influence to cause a messy public incident on Twitter.
temp8964
I doubt you can communicate to their customer service bots.
addandsubtract
And now the tweet has been deleted, without any updates (to my knowledge). Would be nice to find out what exactly happened.
shkkmo
Yet another example of why we need a users bill of rights to give users some standardized legal recourse to discover the reasons for account bans and dispute them.
prepend
I like bringing up the Uniform Commercial Code [0] as a template for this kind of stuff. Where there’s a common goal and groups push for legislation in each state.
Sadly I’m not sure there’s a good advocacy group to push for this. Mozilla is funded by Google who definitely doesn’t want any user rights that conflict with their revenue. Maybe the EFF or FSF.
shkkmo
A state by state push would be one way to make this happen, but given that online companies and their users are often in different states, this does seem like the kind of interstate commerce that could be addressed federally.
I'm not hugely optimistic about this. It's possible that the pushback against tech will enable something like this to get passed, but I'm pretty sure that pushback is for purely for political points and not being done with any intent to actually change much.
prepend
That’s the beauty of UCC, it’s in every state. The idea is to get uniform laws in every state for the precise reasons you say.
lostgame
Can I take a moment to recommend 'OwnCloud'? ( https://owncloud.com )
I may be out of the loop, but my experience with it has been great. It's a (mostly?) open-source, self-hosted DropBox(ish) clone - with a great UI, web browser support as well as native MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS apps. (I figure there's probably some sort of Linux client as well? I'd have no idea.)
I'm shocked that Adult Swim isn't using something like this internally to work around this very issue. I'm sure they send copyrighted clips of shit to each other all the time for reference material. They've never run into this issue before? Even once?
Lesson learned - depend as little as possible on services you can extremely easy replicate on your own. When my free DropBox storage ran out years ago, I installed OwnCloud and have never even thought about cloud storage since. It 'just works'.
acidburnNSA
I use a similar thing called Seafile on "my own" VPS and love it, syncing to local ZFS NAS with autosnapshots and regular-ish offline and "offsite" backups (two big external drives, swapped whenever I visit family a few states over). Self-hosting FTW. I'm sure owncloud and nextcloud are easier and more complete these days so that'd probably be my choice if I were doing it from scratch. I also do self-hosted CalDAV (radicale) for contacts and calendar, and self-hosted email (dovecot/postfix/spamassassin).
neurostimulant
NextCloud is a popular fork of OwnCloud by its original developer, and doesn't seem to gate features on their self-hosted version.
lostgame
Hey, thanks so kindly for bringing that to my attention! I'll probably migrate my system to NextCloud. :)
neurostimulant
Also, there is native support for nextcloud in mainstream linux desktop out of the box now (gnome), which covers contacts, calendar and files data.
fs111
There are 0 details here. Does anyone know what the secret TOS violation is supposed to be?
Narretz
"Secret" means that the supposed account violation wasn't specified in the message from Dropbox. Possibly an automated decision. And apparently it was without warning on the first offense? Definitely need more info. And extremely worrying for me as a customer that they will take down the whole account for a single toc violation.
slightwinder
Quite possible something hard illegal, like problematic porn or terrorism or such. I guess in case of some random hollywood-alarm being triggered, there would have been a DMCA-complain coming from that party.
Tryk
Or a file containing the number '1' (https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-drive-flags-text-files-con...)
mrguyorama
I think Justin is making the statement that he has no idea what rule he violated
dingleberry420
No, that's what secret means.
ben174
This is just drama for drama's sake at this point. There is absolutely nothing to see here.
cosmin800
Everybody should check and recheck they actually own their data, github accounts, digitalocean boxes, google accounts dropbox accounts, youtube accounts, the list goes on and on. It is obvious by now that it can happen to anyone for any reason (datacenter fire too) at anytime.
Every now and then there is a similar post on hackernews.
chasd00
yeah i feel like the best thing to do these days is just setup a server, encrypt your files, and use scp. ...like we were doing in the 90s
micromacrofoot
One thing that helps me think about which cloud services to use is the phrase "a stranger's house."
If I'm working on something important to me... how comfortable am I leaving it in a stranger's house? If I wouldn't be comfortable doing it, I always make a local backup. This saved my ass when I inexplicably lost access to an old Google Drive account. I lost a couple days of work, rather than a couple months. I still have no idea why that account was disabled.
taesu
Are people still using dropbox? I thought other integrated service such as google drive and onedrive would have drove dropbox to the grave
codazoda
I use and am happy with Dropbox. I was an early adopter of Google Drive (to try to save costs) and it never really worked right. There were lots of bugs with the syncing of data. My entire digital world is on Dropbox. I use (and pay for) Google Drive too, but I use it differently.
It works for me because, in theory, all my data is on every HD in my house (which is really just two). So, I don't lose anything if Dropbox deletes my account; I've got it all locally.
That theory doesn't work anymore, however, because I have 399 GB of data in Dropbox and I don't duplicate it all to every machine anymore because of the size and the data transfer required to keep that much locally and in the cloud.
I really do need to start thinking about this again so that I can get it all duplicated locally.
nvrspyx
As far as I know, if you just have the files as "Keep local" or whatever, Dropbox will still delete them locally if it's removed from Dropbox. The only exception is if you're also using the backup feature to backup certain folders on your machine that's not in the Dropbox folder.
alwa
I use and am happy with them too—although if Dropbox deletes files from your account, or deletes your account outright, doesn’t that reach out and delete the data from all of the synced devices too, regardless of the number of devices that happen to be local to you?
Do you use a second line of local backups/versioning to protect against that possibility?
dangrossman
700 million people use them, and 17 million are on a paid plan. I still use Dropbox, because I don't trust that I'd be able to reach a helpful human at Google should anything happen to my Google account.
BbzzbB
700M, is that active users? Or does my old account I haven't touched in forever counts?
ta988
Yours and all the ones that robots created for encrypted movie and music sharing.
wollsmoth
we may have different account types but they started wiping inactive accounts a while back. I never installed the client on my computer though, so that probably didn't help.
Msw242
Does this event shake your confidence in Dropbox's helpful humans?
dangrossman
Not yet, as it's just a tweet with no details about what happened after he contacted said humans, if he has.
prepend
I have free OneDrive through my university, and I pay $99/year and I have it through work. With multiple TB available.
Yet I still use Dropbox because it’s way more usable.
Running the OneDrive agent is a hobby and it spikes my machine a few times a day. Running Dropbox is something that just works and has worked for 10 years without me ever noticing the sync app (a good thing).
I avoid Google because I wouldn’t want my gmail to turn off because of an event like this.
vikingerik
How do you never notice the sync app? I stopped using Dropbox because I got sick of the client (on Windows) constantly blaring about new features and corporate sharing tools.
prepend
I muted that stuff years ago and have it run on startup. I get no notifications and if I put a file in that folder it syncs up. And files I add to dropbox sync down.
Granted I haven’t run the windows client in a long time so I’m talking about my MacOS experience. But OneDrive on MacOS does all sorts of shenanigans. The funniest is when it logs me out and forces a hard resync. As a user, I never want that.
beebmam
Never had any CPU spikes from OneDrive. How much are you storing on it?
prepend
It’s hard to tell, but I think 195GB in the cloud and 44GB on my typical workstation.
I run on MacOS and my cpu has spiked twice today already. When I hear the fans, it’s usually OneDrive.
I don’t mind the cpu as I have lots but it might take 30 seconds to sync a new word document before I can share it, so that’s annoying.
With Dropbox it’s almost instantaneous and the file just syncs up.
I’m not sure what OneDrive is doing, but it’s harder to use. I don’t want to slow down and wait for OneDrive to sync before I work with others.
Espressosaurus
The more files you have, the more OneDrive tends to chew as a baseline. If you exceed those limits it'll just sit and chew without actually updating anymore. I want to say something like 200K files is the limit.
If you're using it for work to sync build dependencies or your build tree or similar, it's easy to accidentally end up exceeding those limits and watch it eat CPU time totally ineffectually. Ask me how I know!
nvarsj
It's the only solution still that "just works" on all OSs and mobile devices. I spent a year trying to use alternatives like Syncthing and Resilio and they all have pain points, especially on mobile. Gave up and just paid for Dropbox. I would gladly self host if there was an option that worked well on mobile.
gerdesj
I've been using Nextcloud and before that Owncloud for years. I recently switched to the native mobile client from a generic web DAV client. It supports one way sync for things like photos which is very handy. My home NC has around 1/2TB in use so far.
I also look after another one for a company with several 1000 users' safety docs on it. Nearly all the clients are mobiles and tablets using the native client. This NC is more of a one way thing where one dept uploads pdfs and the drivers and co read them on their tablets. Office staff point a browser at it.
6ak74rfy
+1 to Nextcloud. It works really well and you own the data completely.
Office document editing experience isn’t the best on mobile but I don’t use that feature anyway. Markdown editing works well.
xalava
It's the only cloud service that works on all platforms and not trying to promote their own file formats
alex_smart
I think Mega also works on all platforms, but yes, amongst the major competitors (OneDrive and Google Drive), Dropbox is clearly the best.
eatsyourtacos
Onedrive can't handle a ton of files without just breaking.. at least not up until a few years ago at best.
We have ~1 million files in our dropbox that we use for business. Lots of files change each day. And everything just works. It uses some CPU, but honestly for what it's doing it's not too bad. At least dropbox can handle it, other type of file syncing apps just stop working.
So for small-medium business I'm not sure what the alternative is to dropbox if you are file-system heavy unless it's just for throwing some random files here and there.
voisin
I ditched them for OneDrive which comes with an Office365 subscription. OneDrive is buggy, has file naming issues (on MacOS at least), is a memory hog, and has a host of other issues. So I tried iCloud+ which comes with AppleOne subscription, and it lacks some of the sharing/directory collab features I wanted.
So yes, there are alternatives, many of which are free or included in other subscriptions, but they lack the focus of Dropbox, which Dropbox itself nearly lost when it tried to become something beyond file storage, versioning, and sharing.
capybara_2020
How do you use Office365 specifically email?
I only use it for one of my lesser used domains and it is the worst email/app experience I have had in ages.
For some reason the outlook app went blank and had to resync. Missed a really important email. It gets like 100 MS update emails which have zero relevance to me and then it sends random emails I am not sure how to unsub from. It shows notifications for all those random emails and actual important ones get lost.
I got it for the 1TB storage space and teams(let me not even start on that). But now I am seriously considering moving that domain to gmail and zoom.
Nextgrid
I use it on Mac with the built-in email client. On Linux, Evolution (via Evolution Data Server) supports Exchange too. I find their proprietary HTTP-based protocol much more reliable than IMAP and it's the only way to get push email on iOS using the stock client (it doesn't support IMAP IDLE and their proprietary equivalent is only open to GMail and Fastmail, no way to self-host and no other providers are supported).
brightball
Been using them steadily for over a decade. Their core service is still great, at least for personal use.
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Reminds me of an incident we had with Dropbox a decade ago. They deleted some niche accounting software (custom developed by us) from our Dropbox account, plus their own log files covering those deletions. Then played ignorant.
We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything.
(Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a story.)
EDIT: Only executables & related distribution files were on Dropbox, not any source code. We lost nothing...except our trust in Dropbox.
EDIT2: Yes, as several others have kinda pointed out, this incident was a collision between (a) naive human expectations (of high-skill, high-touch, highly-invested customer service for such situations) and (b) the actual business model of any huge / cheap or free / convenient cloud provider of X (plus just "internet reality"). Sadly, I don't see that either (a) or (b) has changed in the past decade.