Dropbox keeps threatening to delete my files

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

Dropbox synced with an empty folder, i.e. deleted everything. I didn&#x27;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.

I actually haven&#x27;t noticed but they stopped bothering me about a year ago.<p>There used to be endless &quot;Dropbox has stopped syncing&quot; emails - brought on due to shared photos from a friend&#x27;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&#x27;s roughly 7+ years before they got the message that I wasn&#x27;t going to fall for it!

I&#x27;ve been a Dropbox user for a long time with the 2TB option.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t deleted it yet.

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

Is Dropbox this tacky with all users, or only with users who started it (by dumping 1TB on them, because &quot;why wouldn&#x27;t I&quot;)?

I&#x27;ve been recieving these for 5-6 years now. Last I checked, they haven&#x27;t deleted my stuff, which is pretty nice of them.

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.<p>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.<p>The weird part of it:<p>- I&#x27;ll never actively delete that account because even if it&#x27;s way out of date, it&#x27;s still an additional copy. Beyond laziness, I&#x27;ve counter incentives to not do it.<p>- GDPR directives would probably allow them to delete the account after X years of inactivity, it clearly hasn&#x27;t happened. Or there&#x27;s still some of my scripts logging in somewhere even as it doesn&#x27;t sync anything ? Or they didn&#x27;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.<p>I could speak of the time when Google drive URL-encoded the names of all of my files turning spaces into %20s…<p>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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1150&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1150&#x2F;</a>

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?<p>Edit: What a shit show of passive aggressive dark patterns from the company. This is grossly common among today&#x27;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.

I think the author&#x27;s premise is flawed even if the post comes off as good natured fun :)<p>I doubt they will host your content graveyard for free in perpetuity. I&#x27;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&#x27;m working on kicking that habit too).<p>That said it&#x27;s pretty clear Dropbox policy changed and quoting a forum response from 6 years ago seems flimsy, maybe even disingenuous. That it&#x27;s still the top response on Google surely says more about Google?

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&#x27;t actually using it, that&#x27;s not ideal.

Why does anyone continue to use Dropbox?