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.<p>We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything.<p>(Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a story.)<p>EDIT: Only executables & related distribution files were on Dropbox, not any source code. We lost nothing...except our trust in Dropbox.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>It's sad, I used to really like dropbox but now they just suck.
Never would have happened if you just used FTP like Brandon said<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224</a>
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?
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.
Can I take a moment to recommend 'OwnCloud'? ( <a href="https://owncloud.com" rel="nofollow">https://owncloud.com</a> )<p>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.)<p>I'm <i>shocked</i> 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 <i>all the time</i> for reference material. They've never run into this issue before? Even once?<p>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 <i>thought</i> about cloud storage since. It 'just works'.
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.<p>Every now and then there is a similar post on hackernews.
One thing that helps me think about which cloud services to use is the phrase "a stranger's house."<p>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.
Hopefully this will stop HNers from linking everyone ye olde "this is why Dropbox is better than your nerdass solution" comment, and hopefully it vindicates everyone over the years who countered that argument by asking what happens when Dropbox deletes your account apropos of nothing...
Dropbox ghosted me a while back, I guess they don't need advice on matters like this, so I'll just show up in the comments.<p>Shouldn't the files remain on the hard drive even if Dropbox deleted their end?<p>I switched to Spider oak for a while, but more because I wanted encryption at rest, I didn't have an issue with them beyond not adding that feature.<p>I then moved to just backing up locally and alternating between two USB hard drives, one of which was stored in a safe deposit box at my credit union, because a one time fee for a hard drive or three encrypted using Veracrypt (then Truecrypt? Memory is fuzzy) plus a safe deposit box is simpler and cheaper.<p>I like to keep things offline, and it was interesting when a bank I talked to about opening one in my new city was... oddly obstructionist about that ask.<p>(Has anyone else told a bank you're an aspiring journalist, would like to purchase a small safe deposit box to hold your birth certificate, passport, and a backup of your files, then tried to have a will drawn up to designate someone who would receive the contents of the box in the event of your death, then had someone break into your apartment and very obviously look into your notebooks?<p>I still don't have a good answer for that fundemental problem that devices can be hacked, but physical security is hard.<p>Anyways, sorry to go on a tangent, but it doesn't surprise me that maybe Justin did something very bad, and they just want to end the relationship and not interact anymore, but I won't get specific in a public forum.<p>Dropbox itself was kind of buggy for me, sometimes it'd fail at whatever their implementation of rsync did, and start filling my hard drive with multiple copies of my Dropbox folder, at best filling it up -- I suspect their shit code is one reason I kept having to have Applecare to keep replacing my hard drive.<p>That or the assholes who kept blasting me with malware... I suspect it was the same set of people who were skimming credit cards from Mother Bear's and uploading them to the dark web, if any of the feds who cyberstalk me are bored this morning ;-)
I use ResilioSync (formerly Bittorrent Sync) for my personal Dropbox-like stuff. The iOS client is sparse but functional, and it has clients for pretty much every OS I need, including arm Debian... so I have my 'not-quite-Dropbox' home on a Raspberry Pi.<p>We also use it to cross-backup photo libraries with an avid photographer friend who lives across town.<p>It works very, very well.
hmmm...<p>I largely use <a href="https://github.com/bailey27/cppcryptfs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bailey27/cppcryptfs</a> with dropbox?<p>This would essentially eliminate any possibility of violating any terms of service as far as I can tell?<p>I'm not too comfortable putting any files on dropbox without some sort of encryption<p>fwiw, I've found that cppcryptfs is one of the better implementations of that sort though most (if not all) use the same library which seems to choke on certain files once in a while
Sounds like an opportunity for a new company that abstracts away the actual different cloud providers, provides redundancy, and provides a security abstraction layer that prevents cloud hosts from knowing what their segments of files are for.
All TOS violations on all platforms are always secret. They will never tell you what you did. We are all one secret violation away from digital homelessness. Being booted from Dropbox is probably one of the least bad boots you can get.
Dropbox, quite frankly, sucks.<p>I had an account there. Didnt use it much. Then I had a friend share a few videos for me to check for quality and content. They were on paid and I wasn't. The simple act of "sharing from their account" put *my* account over storage quota. I couldn't do ANYTHING with my account, including downloading any of the videos.<p>Basically my only option was to pay them for more "storage", even though my friend paid. They're effectively infinitely double-dipping for what amounts to a link.<p>I abandoned the account after that crap.
Even with this and even with not updating their client for macOS anymore they are still better than Google Drive and One Drive.<p>OneDrive for example: you can't delete a file into the trash anymore. It gets just deleted, like a force delete. So if you are offline or OneDrive is not running or the file has not yet been uploaded to OneDrive, that file is GONE. MS response: use the online trash. It worked until they updated to the new 12.3 macOS sync system (icloud can delete to trash, so I fully blame this on MS). Also if one file does not sync for whatever reason ALL syncs are stopped until this conflict is resolved.<p>GoogleDrive. If in drive stream mode (which i think is the default) it is mounted as a volume, so it is not "there" when you login, so any files opened from there will not open until GoogleDrive is mounted. Also saving to this Volume mounted google drive with some apps will trash the file. MySQL Workbench trashed files very very often. You need to restore from the google drive backup in this case. If you switch to all files always local it is like Dropbox and works, unless you want to upload symlinks or something with characters that don't match googles like and then you have missing files. At least other files will sync. I also have no idea if they actually support macOS 12.3 file sync type fully ...<p>iCloud: Works ... except that what you see in the finder is not what you actually have in the Terminal because it is a mix of actual files and data folders from applications. Sharing is a pain between users. I also don't think it works well on non Apple systems.
Probably stored 'Doc and Mharti' on there<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngN7eJUQyXk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngN7eJUQyXk</a>
> secret TOS violation<p>This is unfortunately a legal issue and no company big enough to have good lawyers will ever want to tell a customer why they're being banned as it exposes them to too much legal risk.<p>If there's a solution to this, it's probably to give companies some sort of protection from legal action resulting from incorrect application of their TOS. That's far from ideal itself, but it would at least remove some of the downside to honesty from companies on this sort of issue.<p>I can't blame Dropbox (or any other company who does this) given the potential downsides they face.
It's concerning that Dropbox is scanning user data. I understand the benefits of doing that (CSAM/copyright). One of the selling points of Dropbox is offsite backup and if they can delete data at anytime then its obvious to me Dropbox is no good. I personally don't use Dropbox. But if I did I wonder if something like gocryptfs [1] can be integrated with the Dropbox folder.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs</a>
Ironically Twitter feed recommends me this tweet right below Dropbox tweet<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ResNeXtGuesser/status/1534596133506252800?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ResNeXtGuesser/status/153459613350625280...</a>
Is that why something like IPFS, Skiff, etc exists to avoid this?<p>[0] <a href="https://ipfs.io" rel="nofollow">https://ipfs.io</a><p>[1] <a href="https://skiff.com" rel="nofollow">https://skiff.com</a>
The number of people who apparently "can't believe this" and suggesting Google in the twitter thread is beyond belief. I thought we had already learnt not to trust them
I wish governments imposed a support API on public cloud companies and forced them to triage requests 24/7, with the obligation to track them via open Grafana dashboards.
Why anyone would deliberately use a sync or backup provider that openly reads your data and pries into the very meat of what you store with them is beyond me. Even if it's an algorithm doing this instead of a human makes it no less disgustnig to tolerate. It's as flatly insulting that these companies think this okay and many users don't mind as having someone rifle through your personal diaries and documents in your house just because they come to do housekeeping.<p>Alternatives easily exist, and im not even talking about self hosting. There are plenty of zero knowledge sync and backup services and if you're really stuck on using Crapbox or Google Dreck, you can use any one of a number of encryption services for your data first, so that these bigcos can't snoop worth a shit and randomly punish you for what they find.
I assume they still have a local copy of it and can backup using an external drive. Because I am a Rick and Morty fan and I don't want any delays.