You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Safeguard data on sudden drive-failure to avoid accidental deletions
The following issue cannot get solved by using any setting inside Dropbox or by external precautions – such as alerts on OS-level. Staff should find a support ticket on the problem I describe. A few months ago, we ran into a sudden mass deletion of all Dropbox data. It turned out that the reason was trivial – and that the same could happen again any day. An M2 SSD drive screwed into a Laptop didn’t sit perfectly tight in its slot and its pins had lost contact. This drive was used for Dropbox (local storage). Dropbox interpreted this loss of contact with the drive as full deletion and silently nuked all files we store on Dropbox (in Cloud + all attached machines). Technically, it's the same data loss you'll experience when you unplug an external drive with Dropbox running while the machine on. As we work with large files, we run Dropbox in a fashion that leaves all data on local machines and cloud-syncs it. Whenever a drive fails, it will therefore erase all Dropbox data. Rollbacks via Dropbox may help recover data. Yet, nothing can protect our Dropbox volume (hundreds of GB) from getting cleared in the first place. Any app or website that references data stored on Dropbox obviously would get affected by full data removal. This could cause substantial initial damage (blank pages, due to missing data) and likely lots of clean-up-work (once data got recovered). We already considered options to sniff out unexpected directory write operations – here's a Microsoft tool one may use on Windows. Such a tool, however, even when perfectly configured (shuts down local Dropbox when self-destruction is detected) would only rescue Dropbox data on local machines. Any 3rd party references to Dropbox data would still break – as they plug into Dropbox Cloud storage, which still gets nuked when a drive suddenly dies or disconnects. We would therefore like to see a mechanism for paid Dropbox tiers that kicks in, as soon as a computer logged into Dropbox issues the deletion of the full Dropbox volume. Dropbox should stop executing this command on its cloud instance and all drives machines it still can access and ask Admins (via E-Mail / Push Message), how it should proceed: A computer logged into this acount has requested to delete all files on Dropbox. The name of this machine is [“human-readable Computer Name”], Would you like to proceed? If yes, please enter your Dropbox Password. ⚠ This message may also get caused by a hardware error on the computer in question. As long as you do not confirm by entering your Dropbox password, no data will be deleted in the cloud or on connected computers. Enter password to delete all Dropbox data | Cancel delete operation Please consider this addition. It requires practically no GUI and would not introduce workflow changes. Yet, this little change would bring Dropbox data integrity to the next level.
