How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

Hey guys - Dropbox product manager here,<p>tl;dr: The scenario described by the OP is now less likely to occur. Since October, individual Dropbox users are encouraged to create separate accounts when invited to a Team and warned that Teams admins will have control over the account.<p>We want individual and Team Dropbox users to have the best possible experience. Some users want to migrate their personal accounts into a Team. Others are much happier with separate personal and Teams accounts. We’ve been working to make that choice much clearer for the account holder and the Teams admin.<p>If users do choose to merge their personal account with a Team, things become a bit tricky. Teams admins want better control of data within a Team, and users want easy access to their personal stuff, but it’s not possible for us to differentiate between Team data and personal stuff in the same account.<p>Here are some thoughts on the points raised by the OP:<p>* Better support for multiple accounts: Users can quickly switch between using personal and Teams accounts on the web today and we intend to make this better across our platforms.<p>* Improved messaging to Teams admins: We plan to provide better messaging to admins before disabling an account that was migrated in.<p>* Disabled accounts are not immediately deleted: We can work with Teams admins and users to sort out account issues and recover users’ files.<p>We’ve contacted the OP to help resolve his case and are sorry for any pain this caused!

Another Dropbox horror story: My colleague lost most of his Dropbox folder last week, and wasn't able to recover everything.<p>What happened: he had Dropbox synced to 2 computers, but one of them hadn't been used in a while. He turned on the old computer, and apparently, for some reason, Dropbox decided that the fact that many files weren't there was because they were deleted. Of course, the files weren't there because they hadn't been synced yet!<p>So Dropbox decided, when the old computer was turned on, to delete 10s of thousands of files that were in my colleague's account.<p>He reached out to them to help restore. It took several days (this happened on a weekend), but they did eventually restore it. Unfortunately, since it was difficult for them to pinpoint exactly what was the start of the event, some files were not recovered (I'm not sure the exact reason this was difficult to do).<p>I love Dropbox [1], but this was a serious blow to how much I trust them with my files.<p>[1] Just look at my comment history to see - I've raved about them several times on HN.

Intermingling personal and work accounts is almost always a bad idea. I've seen colleagues get their personal accounts subpoenaed, have a firing result in loss of primary email/cell, or have really awkward communications show up in an IT audit.<p>The overhead of maintaining separate accounts is very small (multi-profile browser, multi-account smartphone, etc.), and more than worth it given the liabilities. Beyond that, I think it's just a lot healthier to know where the boundaries between your work and personal life are.

Had the exact same situation last year. Was interning at a startup for a couple of weeks. I joined their Team-DropBox and some time after leaving the startup, they (logically) revoked my access without either of us knowing what it would result in.<p>After an email back and forth with both the DropBox-Team-support and the startup, I got my account back in the exact same state as it was in, when my account got revoked. I still had all of the startups stuff but it no longer synced. As I was many GB over the limit of my free DropBox-account I deleted all the files belonging to the startup (which of course is the right thing to do).<p>I'm glad this is getting some attention, because it is clearly not working very well as it is right now. Hopefully DropBox will make the user experience better.

This seems like an issue best resolved through Dropbox support, not through HN Soapbox support.<p>Edit: My main point is that I come here to read Hacker News, not Some Other Guy's Support Problems. Treating every dropped use case as a public relations crisis is just an exercise in getting yourself worked up for no reason. If this is a <i>real</i> issue that affects <i>multiple, real</i> users, then I'm sure Dropbox will do something about it. For now, I think it's reasonable to treat it as an oversight until we have a response from Dropbox or more information. Unless, of course, you're the type of person that just likes to get pissed off at companies. In that case, I should probably find another community to read "hacker news".

If I were Dropbox, and designing this feature, I'd have created two folders inside the master Dropbox folder. "Personal" and "Teams" then inside the "Teams" folder, I'd have created a folder for each team a person is invited to join. I realize that structure wasn't in-place when Dropbox was first created, complicating the matter - but it seems like it would have provided the cleanest way to delineate what files and access would be revoked when a user is removed from a team.

Dropbox does one thing and does one thing well. They've worked really hard to keep feature creep to a minimum. Dropbox for teams is a feature that adds so much over and beyond the initial KISS offering that the cracks in the 'just one folder' model are beginning to show. Ideally you'd have two or more folders marked as dropbox folders where you could associate each individual folder with the team or not at will.<p>Now your only real solution from what I can see is to create multiple accounts, if you don't want to give the team administrator the chance to nuke your account if he/she feels like it. Warnings about the possible consequences do not really solve the underlying issue and having the original team leader have a say in the unblocking of your account doesn't help at all.<p>This is a feature that will need some serious work and breaks the simple dropbox model that has gotten dropbox to where it is today.

I had an identical experience. I submitted a flurry of customer service tickets without a response. I was damn near ready to walk down to their office since they don't provide any type 1-800 number.<p>Finally, I got a response from a customer support rep named Todd who explained to me that my account had been deleted when I was removed from the Team. Fortunately, he was able to restore my account and I weaseled an extra 5GB of month for the trouble.<p>Quite the scare.

I am repeating a portion of one of my comments here because I think it could be very useful to many Dropbox users. If you implement this tonight you will, effectively, isolate your local data from Dropbox and any accidental loss at Dropbox will not result in total loss locally. Of course, you are responsible for local backups. If this gets up-voted to the top of the thread it might just help a lot of people avoid accidental loss of valuable data.<p>My approach for Dropbox on both Windows and OSX is to have the Dropbox folder on a dedicated drive partition. If that is not possible, you can use a drive that will never see development work or any data that will need to be shared via Dropbox (business data, kid's pictures, etc.).<p>This forces a FILE COPY operation rather than a FILE MOVE operation when you drag-and-drop files into any Dropbox folder. Which, in turn, means that everything in Dropbox could be trashed tomorrow and nothing whatsoever would be lost locally.<p>For years I have gotten in the habit of having at least two physical drives on every machine: System and Data. If I don't want to create a dedicated Dropbox partition I can usually place my Dropbox folder in the System drive and this will trigger copy-on-drag-and-drop whenever dragging files in from the Data drive.<p>If you don't have separate physical System and Data drives (highly recommended) you can split a single drive into System and Data partitions or simply split-off a Dropbox partition in order to achieve the same results.<p><pre><code> DROPBOX FEATURE REQUEST: It would be very nice if the Dropbox client software could have an option to auto-magically COPY files in and out of Dropbox rather than allowing any files to be moved.</code></pre>

We had this happen over the summer to someone that left and were removed from the team. It was resolved by contacting Dropbox support, so I'm not sure why you've not had luck with that but then it is the holiday period. Dropbox's recent changes to how Teams Admins can manage connected accounts (which in my opinion are a bit excessive) might help with this process. Their ToS explains these changes but an email they sent round in October explains it better: <a href="https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/39bd6ae2-a0b6-41a9-87a4-621c9edf9f90/391970b0b9683207a786f3e2f8c1afea" rel="nofollow">https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/39bd6ae2-a0b6-41a9-87a4...</a>

Paging Google and Microsoft. Now's as good a time as any to promote your cloud storage services and help a guy out.

So when joining a startup (or anything else) that uses Dropbox for Teams, you make a new account just for that project? Perhaps startups (and other entities) that require dropbox membership might make that suggestion?

I can imagine why it is so hard to roll back to your old account once you leave a team. It might be best for companies to advise their employees to create separate dropbox account before joining a team.

This should be better communicated when upgrading your account to join a team. Individuals place a lot of blind trust in cloud providers with their life's data.<p>This would be completely unacceptable, ever to risk my data in any way and I'm a little surprised Dropbox doesn't realize they don't have a business without trust that their data will always be ok.

I had the exact same issues as the OP (interned at a startup and used personal Dropbox account for Dropbox for teams), but I was aware of the potential issue upon leaving the Dropbox for Teams account and emailed Dropbox support and everything worked out fine.

I am amazed -- but not surprised -- that you would role out the "Team" feature without thinking through -- and solving -- such scenarios.<p>It seems to be a small minority of people who really do so. And often, they are ignored or even berated, and "slow-tracked", until the shit hits the fan.<p>If the account is accurate, I have no sympathy for Dropbox on this. This was entirely predictable, and any amount of effective due diligence would have mitigated it.<p>P.S. Of course, it also goes to say to the "victim": Dropbox is <i>synchronization</i>, not <i>back-up</i>. You need to back your shit up to a medium over which <i>you</i> have control. (Said control including taking it off-line where no online activity can affect it.)

I've actually been through this twice now (its currently disabled from leaving the second company's Team account, I should have known better but I thought they would have "fixed" the issue by now). First time around they just needed my the guy at my last company to approve it being re-enabled (not sure why)... and waiting for that whole flow to start up again for this second time. I should have known better this time :( I really just don't get the reasoning behind the feature being implemented this way. I would imagine Dropbox would want to discourage signing up for multiple accounts just cause ones personal and one's work.

At the risk of stating the obvious, that invitation email ought to be a bit more informative. Maybe, there ought to be an option to create a new account for use with that team.

If it's not possible to un-entangle accounts, then Dropbox needs to support being logged in to several accounts, much like Google does.<p>Also, to not delete user's data.

I'd be really surprised if Dropbox didn't have a way to revert this (and to punish the Dropbox for Teams account creator, if identifiable).

Lesson here is that the best practice for a backup system is to make it so that two (or more) different entities need to screw it up at the same time for you to lose data. Because entities do screw it up.<p>Note, the hardest part, here? is that you are one of the entities. It's very hard to design a system where a hostile entity compromising owner credentials can't lead to data loss.<p>Best I could think of would be a service that keeps your data available in read only mode for a certain period of time (for which you pre-pay) - but I don't know of anyone offering such a service.<p>I suppose a stack of blue-rays in a safety deposit box would come dang close; I mean, sure if /all/ of your credentials were compromised you are still screwed, but if they can impersonate you in person at the bank... well, that's a worse compromise than most people plan for.

I strongly recommend CrashPlan for backups. They may not be marketing aggressively like Dropbox, nor will you find them mentioned N times a day on HN/similar venues, but they provide a damn good product/service.<p>You will not have such issues with them.

Haven't seen it mentioned here; but I am in the process of switching to Cubby from DropBox. It's new. Seeing as how DropBox's most requested features are mostly ignored on their "VoteBox" part of their site, I noticed disgruntled users on said site suggesting Cubby.<p>Sync any folder, security keys, don't have to use the cloud, better data retention, more space, better desktop app, more features in general.<p><a href="https://www.cubby.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cubby.com/</a><p>Yeah, almost seems too good to be true. If anyone uses it perhaps they can share some downsides.

Local mirrored copies of all files on separate hard drive. Bank safety deposit box with bluray discs of files for long-term storage, things that rarely change (my photography work alone is several TBs). Rapidshare (using 3TB right now for the same $8 a month, I accept it's not the most reliable place if a Megaupload situation ever happened). Skydrive for my important documents and programming work. Small program I wrote makes the Rapidshare/Skydrive backups incremental and encrypted on a regular schedule.

Had this happened to me a while back. They don't completely "delete" your stuff, just disable access to it. After contact support and the admin of the account, everything is sugar again.

As a dropbox team admin for my company, I recently removed a member from the team. It explains in bright red writing (from memory) that it will remove the members entire dropbox account.<p>I remember, because I contacted the team member, and got him to back everything up before I procceded.<p>I then contacted Dropbox support, to explain how stupid this was...<p>My point is, that admin should have some accountability, ignoring big red writing is usually a bad idea.

This is why I never trust services like Dropbox. It's painful to maintain backups manually but at least I can sleep well at night knowing that the only points of failure are within my control<p>EDIT: because I realize its not completely obvious, I keep multiple backups with my own servers sitting in different data centers. I don't see how you could trust any external service to store data.

almost $800 to slightly inconvience them isn't worth it, now if it deleted every single file of theirs then I have a few people I would do this to!<p>It does seem silly that they can't simply remove you from a team without deleting your account, I can't think of anything that would stop them from being able to do that other than not having the time or motivation to implement the feature.

Who joins a team account from your worst enemy?

I've run into this problem as well, for me the easiest solution was to run Skydrive for personal and Dropbox teams for work.

I find it outrageous that it takes a story to go public and hit HN for Dropbox support to start doing their job! And so is the pattern for many companies that grow beyond a certain threshold of celebrity. This is a sure indication for me not to trust the company.

I dont get it why someone would use Dropbox in the first place? Google Drive is out for a long enough and it never failed for me; it gives 150% more capacity for free (5gb) and its made by folks @ Google (hello?). Just don't see any reason why to use Dropbox...

Why has dropbox not considered a github style context changing feature till now. I am surprised.

Don't worry... Guido will fix everything next month ;-)

This happened to me, too. Same situation. They were able to fix it after some discussion, but it was pretty crazy that it's set up this way.

Would you also be able to get all of your enemies files? or would your enemy have to share all his folders with the team?

Is it possible to see what clients use this service like you can with other services (dropbox.com/company or whatever)

Haha, great read. Still love Dropbox though. Great and fast responses, way to go Dropbox. Keep up the good work.

Yoni - what's your Twitter handle? Interested to see first hand what Dropbox responded.

Mirror? Getting a Google Drive error: "The app is currently unreachable."

WOAH! This might be happening to me in about two weeks!

Yoni - what's your twitter handle?

If it's not in their TOS (and the FAQ linked to wouldn't count) then you have a great case of willful negligence against both Dropbox and your previous employer. I'd take it to small claims court and sue them for the time and money you spent trying to recover your account.