Dropbox keeps threatening to delete my files | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox keeps threatening to delete my files

khromov.se

110 pointskhromov68 comments

The post is strange (even if not serious). Like, what do you expect?

If the provider deletes data in this situation, people complain. If the provider hosts data for free, there are people who still complain (even accuse the provider with dark patterns). Perhaps that’s why the focus is becoming enterprise customers.

> Like, what do you expect?

Fewer empty threats. A lot fewer.

He could delete the files, and will no longer receive these emails.

Dropbox terms of service:

https://www.dropbox.com/terms

indicates:

> If you don’t pay for your Paid Account on time, we reserve the right to suspend it or remove Paid Account features.

I find it odd if you ask me to store 2.5 TB in my computer, don’t bother deleting my reminders, and even post against me.

> He could delete the files, and will no longer receive these emails.

He could, but that would be less funny and he'd have one less backup.

And it's not his job to delete the files that Dropbox already said they'd throw away.

> I find it odd if you ask me to store 2.5 TB in my computer, don’t bother deleting my reminders, and even post against me.

He paid Dropbox exactly as much money as they asked for, as a normal user in good faith. Dropbox chose to make indefinite cold storage part of the normal plan, rather than have a 3/6/12 month cutoff.

If you offered indefinite cold storage for previous customers, and you were sending emails like this, I wouldn't find it odd at all for someone to post against you.

Pretty sure if they were to delete the files simply, he would complain a lot more.

Who is complaining that their storage provider kept a promise to not delete customer data?

I expect that if they want to delete that data then they should own up and publicly declare so. Back off from the promise publicly.

Or say that “yeah, we say that from time to time, but we don’t really mean that lol”.

Because converting a customer into a paying customer with the promise of “won’t delete even if you stop paying” is a service promise.

Dropbox synced with an empty folder, i.e. deleted everything. I didn't notice for over 30 days which was the cutoff for their historical files. Thus my easy off-site copy which I was previously very attached to effectively deleted everything. I did not go back.

This is a classic lesson that everyone learns called Sync Is Not Backup. Everyone learns it eventually and then writes a blog post on it. It used to be a classic HN meme:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27157427

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008837

And every storage company tells a tale of backup vs sync:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-vs-cloud-sync/

>This is a classic lesson that everyone learns called Sync Is Not Backup.

It's essentially the same story as RAID Is Not A Backup.

Like with sync you have redundancy, but Lord Redundancy never said he was also also Count Time.

Definitely, It's not a backup if it's not at least 3 backups in different places.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

Well, and that a sync can destroy existing files while a proper backup flow can't.

If you had 3 syncs in 3 different providers but deleting your local folder causes all 3 copies to be deleted, that's still no good. You need another place where files can only be added to and never (automatically) removed.

I wasn't referring to syncs at all, but actual point in time backups, so I agree.

There are syncs that can also be configured to not to delete. It's how syncs can do version control.

If you use an off the shell backup or NAS like a Synology or QNAP it will take care of all of that for you. You can plug in external drives to it for copies, an then also have the NAS ship off backup copies to multiple places.

Since the cloud is someone else's computer, it's good to have your own copy of it too on your own hardware.

Hope that helps.

Data is valuable, worth learning to protect :).

Yes, sorry :) Was just trying to clarify it because the GP was talking about sync vs backup. But yeah, multiple copies is a good idea!

Yours is an extremely important clarification too.

Syncs get even worse, because most promised unlimited backups of revisions (thereby implying restoration)... And now maye when "deleted" files take up too much room, they disappear.

There are file clouds out there that seem to be better for the natural kind of use, whether it's backblaze, tarsnap, sync.com, self-hosted options and others.

Something similar happened to me once. I still don't know what exactly happened, but in Dropbox some files were deleted, I still had my local copy, but then Dropbox synced the file deletions and I didn't notice. Only when it was too late did I notice that files were gone and their support was unable to help. I think I managed to recover some files with one of the NTFS "undelete" tools, but that was probably the day I started to treat "the cloud" differently. Nowadays I don't even know what's still in my Dropbox ...

I was clearing out Dropbox when I moved away from it, and it _wouldn't_ let me delete my copy of `tex.web`, because it thought it was some sort of special dropbox file. (It was the source to TeX.)

That's too good. Did you have to rename the file to get Dropbox to delete it?

It's been a few years, but I think I managed to delete it in the web UI. (This was on macos, and they had a kernel extension keeping an eye on things by that point.)

I also had exactly the same experience. I ended up losing lots of documents.

Pfff... I think you can easily replicate that UX with an ftp server and CVS. :D

Reading about his experience, you can replicate the Dropbox behavior with an rm -rf :D ftp and CVS would be actually functional...

Hey now, no need to cast shade at rm -Rf. It's way more functional than Dropbox :)

I actually haven't noticed but they stopped bothering me about a year ago.

There used to be endless "Dropbox has stopped syncing" emails - brought on due to shared photos from a friend's account taking me over the free limit, even though the actual files i have are under the limit. They sent a massive number of email variants since this first triggered back in 2016, so that's roughly 7+ years before they got the message that I wasn't going to fall for it!

I've been a Dropbox user for a long time with the 2TB option.

However, this is a different story and is of Flickr. I have been on Flickr since its early days and had many photos with a pro account. Quite a few apps on Flickr used to use my collection as a way to stress test their applications. My collections were also popular; I had 11+ million views before I abandoned it. I have done my take-out, backup, and downgraded.

The thing is, I found no option to easily delete all the photos while keeping the account for posterity. There is no mass-delete option. So, I was hoping that by violating their usage, they would delete my photos. Hell No, they have kept threatening me for the past many years but haven't deleted it yet.

Just curious — ever tried reaching out to the customer care? :-)

I mean I can’t imagine them not being happy about not having to pay for the hosting, unless they have a clear way of monetising that data (AI/etc and all that).

What do you expect to happen? Continue to host your data for free? This is such an odd thing to write about.

I think the author may not be entirely serious, and may even have been attempting to achieve some level of humor or personal catharsis with their writing.

Perhaps Dropbox shouldn't have promised to keep the files forever then?

It doesn’t seem like the author is upset about this, just interested in seeing what the eventual outcome is. It is interesting to see the tension in their emails between wanting to get the user back as a subscriber and not wanting to continue to host their files for free.

That’s literally what they said they would do.

Companies that offer things for free, I fully expect for them to keep them free forever. If the pay solution is worth it I'll pay.

When they start changing the contract, I find an alternative and use the service as much as I can. My Dropbox is fully backed up but has been full for years and it doesn't matter to me any more.

My rule of thuwb is no tech company's consumer level promise is good for more than 2 years.

That is, if they promise X, I believe they will keep it for 2 years. Anything after that is a bonus.

Yes, but, we still get to dunk on that company and refuse to use them for going back on the guarantees.

Why not?

Many of us host terabytes of opaque data on platforms like GitHub without ever paying or facing deletion threats.

Different businesses. GitHub moat is nothing like Dropbox. Most content on GitHub is extremely small. Terabytes there is an outlier.

You keep your p..n stash on GitHub???

How does that even work, like, can you mount a GitHub project through fuse and put eCryptfs on top?

Asking for a friend.

My question is whether the cost of creating and sending all these emails outweigh the Dropbox recidivism they induce.

Do these emails actually create value or is it a just way to make the company feel better about losing customers?

These emails are automated, so they can send them to many users, and only need a few to come back to make it profitable to do so. Also, the team that is responsible for these emails and for retention (or winning back defectors) may be its own little island and not care about contradicting the forever-promises made elsewhere in the business.

I think he expects them to follow through with the threat.

Should the company not be expected to uphold their promise that they sold him and charged him for?

What promise? You know agreements change all the time right? Google photos, gmail, etc all used to be unlimited until recently. They’re running a business on money not promises from some forum reply.

Make good on the threat I suppose.

Is Dropbox this tacky with all users, or only with users who started it (by dumping 1TB on them, because "why wouldn't I")?

I have the impression that their sales/renewal side is kind of nasty.

I have a vanity domain for myself, and someone from their sales started cold-emailing me to sell me some crazy enterprise plan. After several being ignored they sent a real angry one demanding to be forwarded to someone else at my org (which, to be clear, did not exist).

Can't imagine what real companies get from them if just having a domain name was enough to get that.

These are just people that cancelled, no shenanigans. Dropbox doesn't let you add huge amounts, if there's 1TB there is was almost always legitimate data.

I've been recieving these for 5-6 years now. Last I checked, they haven't deleted my stuff, which is pretty nice of them.

Surprisingly, them keeping your (and the author's, and other abandoners') files probably makes more business sense than deleting them: the files probably don't cost that much to store (my hunch is most abandoners don't have TB's of data), and since they all still have an account, DropBox can spam them with these threats and maybe some percentage of them do return, allowing DB to make money off them.

If the files get deleted, both sides know it'll be the end of their user-provider relationship.

I remember the days when Dropbox was good. It worked exactly as advertised. Syncing data to the cloud and between my machines. All was well.

Then things changed. Their client got really heavy, constant pushes to use other functionality like docs, etc. CPU usage went up and it would slow down my computer. I eventually ended up uninstalling the whole thing.

Been receiving those for years now, as I fully moved to Google Drive + 2 local copies.

The weird part of it:

- I'll never actively delete that account because even if it's way out of date, it's still an additional copy. Beyond laziness, I've counter incentives to not do it.

- GDPR directives would probably allow them to delete the account after X years of inactivity, it clearly hasn't happened. Or there's still some of my scripts logging in somewhere even as it doesn't sync anything ? Or they didn't flag me as EU user and are now lost on what they can do ?

You could buy a 2TB hard drive from eBay for $20 in the time it took you to write this.

Cloud storage just isn’t for me.

I could speak of the time when Google drive URL-encoded the names of all of my files turning spaces into %20s…

Have rolled the dice on offsite hard drive storage so far and been fairly happy, though I’m certainly due a disaster someday.

Dropbox is insane, they expect this to motivate me to give them money? Ha! I took everything off of them years and years ago.

I will note that Dropbox has changed so much from when I first learned of their service. They seem very focused on providing solutions to businesses now compared to back then when it seemed more like a product for individual users.

Because the margin on enterprises is so much higher. Most enterprises will pay money to make a problem go away whereas consumers will look for alternatives.

I'm willing to bet they make $100K+ every round they send these out. Everyone has to consider at least what to do with the email (ignore? accept if it's useful again? maybe just to stop getting bugged)

https://xkcd.com/1150/

The simple solution here is to simply not use Dropbox, or for that matter any service with bad customer service and the asserted right to scan through your files stored with them (looking at you too Google). Why even bother trusting them with that terabyte of data?

Edit: What a shit show of passive aggressive dark patterns from the company. This is grossly common among today's tech giants, and laughably absurd, especially when their CEOs go on the media lecture circuit to talk about things like social responsibility and treating users with respect.

Are they still demanding "accessibility" permission on macOS computers, giving them broad powers to run roughshod over your system? That's the thing I most remember about trying Dropbox, their belligerent installer.

Apple is still rolling out File Provider which I think will fix that

I think the author's premise is flawed even if the post comes off as good natured fun :)

I doubt they will host your content graveyard for free in perpetuity. I've seen Google get rid of more for less and given the horror stories and lack of recourse with the big G I would not trust them to do more than be my email provider (and I'm working on kicking that habit too).

That said it's pretty clear Dropbox policy changed and quoting a forum response from 6 years ago seems flimsy, maybe even disingenuous. That it's still the top response on Google surely says more about Google?

> I doubt they will host your content graveyard for free

Given he says "I migrated away from Dropbox" and "I had no desire to reactivate my account" suggests that his data is doing just fine elsewhere and he doesn't mind if Dropbox deletes it or not, he's just laughing at the desperation of the begging spam he doesn't want.

Just setup an FTP server.

So?

you have to periodically login or good bye data

I do have to point out that cloud hosted storage creates CO2 emissions, so if you aren't actually using it, that's not ideal.

I mean, breathing does too so watch your workouts. Being more serious, I don't think micromanaging your own cloud storage would help that much. The cloud provider is going to have that storage deployed and available regardless.

Why does anyone continue to use Dropbox?

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