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Comment by astrophysics | Hacker News Reader

After having individual files deleted repeatedly from Dropbox, I am not going anywhere near them again. Penetration testing is part of my job, and any PDFs related to that, keep being deleted. Why are they moderating my content? Never again.

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That’s really annoying. I have some windows crack tools for exploit testing that I can’t store on Dropbox unless I encrypt the file before Dropbox.

I don’t want this feature in my cloud storage. Especially since some of this stuff is long term storage for my NAS. I’d hate to try a restore after 10 years to find something flagged and deleted.

I could understand them if I was sharing links or something but I just keep them as personal backups.

Their unreliability is why I can’t use them as a paid service.

Try syncthing

I've been using it for years to sync files between all my devices

https://syncthing.net/

I have setup a syncthing to dump data from my devices onto a staging server which nightly backups everything onto Wasabi using encrypted target with an rclone though any targets that rclone supports would work.

The only thing that I have not figured out how to backup is photos from wife's iphone. I guess I'm going to bite the bullet, buy a mac and do her phone to her icloud, from her icloud to a mac and from that mac to synthing to the staging server.

I have also brought up an edge server that acts as an on the fly decryption proxy to a different Wasabi bucket where I drop files I want to share.

There are third party commercial apps for importing data from/to iPhone for Windows and Mac (iMazing is one of those). If you don’t prefer that, you can also avoid iCloud storage as a go between by getting photos directly from the iPhone to the Mac by using a cable to connect them and importing photos using Image Capture or Photos.

I kind of want it to "just work" with no work on iPhone user's side

I also stopped using OneDrive when I discovered it automatically categorised uploaded files based on their content, including pictures. Aside from the creep factor and this making obvious that they have full access of everything, it also was not particularly accurate as expected from yet another AI system.

You should expect any big cloud backups provider to have full access to your files, don't expect Google, Dropbox or Yandex to be any different than OneDrive. Use something like rclone[1] to upload encrypted backups.

[1] https://rclone.org/

Do you happen to have any source for this? I try to find information on Dropbox removing individual files, even supposedly "illegal" files, from one's account but can't find confirmation so far.

Indeed. From my communication with Dropbox support:

—-

Katie, Feb 5, 8:56 AM PST: Hi Alexander,

Thank you for contacting Dropbox. My name is Katie, and I will be helping you today.

It appears that your links are disabled because you may be hosting malware from your account and this is against the terms of service.

Can you please remove all malware from your account or your account will be disabled. Any further violations of the terms of service will result in the immediate deletion of your account with no warning.

The file that needs to be removed from your Dropbox is: old-stuff.rar

Once this has been addressed I would be happy to assist you further!

Thank you.

Regards, Katie The Dropbox Team

Dropbox does read and analyses my files.

> Why are they moderating my content?

Because they don't want to be hosting malware and child porn. There are certainly false positives and your use case is such that it makes sense to go somewhere else. But you have to admit that your use case is fairly niche.

try https://www.lucidlink.com, works like a charm and you are in control of your files.

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