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.
Fewer empty threats. A lot fewer.
Dropbox terms of service:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
That is, if they promise X, I believe they will keep it for 2 years. Anything after that is a bonus.
Many of us host terabytes of opaque data on platforms like GitHub without ever paying or facing deletion threats.
How does that even work, like, can you mount a GitHub project through fuse and put eCryptfs on top?
Asking for a friend.
Do these emails actually create value or is it a just way to make the company feel better about losing customers?
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.
If the files get deleted, both sides know it'll be the end of their user-provider relationship.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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?
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.
