> There's nothing more painful than such a loss to make it clear that YOU are responsible for your data and nobody else is, no matter what the claims might say.

These are the kind of lessons that for some reason don't transfer person-to-person like they should be only sink in once they've happened to you (at a guess, that's why you're being downvoted). Whether it is your corporate data worth $800K or your photographs of your first child hours after being born through the point that you realize that it is all gone data is priceless.

In the end it all boils down to the same thing: you can't outsource your responsibility on this one, and a single service holding your data still counts as a single point of failure.

Personal responsibility and the acceptance thereof is a major item on the checklist, anybody downvoting robomartin in this thread still has some learning to do on that front. Don't shoot the messenger if you don't like the message. Dropbox is not a backup, no matter what their marketing literature says and no matter how safe you think they are. In the end you and you alone are responsible for your data and its safety.

A back-up that you have not tried to restore might as well not be there.

> He brought out the part of the HN crowd that wants things to be on-topic and/or useful instead of user-blaming

Right. You didn't obviously read my comments, did you? Maybe you just skimmed them and chose to jump on the band-wagon?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963826

I'll quote the most relevant and definitely constructive/useful parts here you don't have to bother with the links if you don't want to. If you do, please slow down and read it all. Then think about the idea of loosing, I don't know, a year's worth of work and blaming someone else for it.

Here it is (reformatted because HN does not have a much-needed block-quote markup):

    My approach for Dropbox on both Windows and OSX is to have the 
    Dropbox folder on a drive that will never see development work, 
    even if that means creating a separate partition for it. 
    
    In most cases the system drive works fine (you do have separate 
    system and data drives on your machines, right?).
    
    This forces a COPY operation rather than a file MOVE if you 
    drag-and-drop files into any Dropbox folder. Which means that 
    everything in the Dropbox folder could be trashed tomorrow and 
    nothing whatsoever would be lost.

Do this TODAY and unless you have massive local loss of data you don't have to worry about Dropbox loosing any of your data at all. Not one bit. If that isn't constructive I don't know what it.

Then I also said:

    FEATURE REQUEST: It would be very nice if 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. 
    
    The above-mentioned hack works fine but it'd be nice to not have to 
    use it. Also, I'd venture to guess that most Dropbox users don't do 
    this, which opens them to unintended loss.

In other words, if Dropbox could implement the suggested approach EVERYONE, engineer or not, would be spared of total data loss due to something going on at Dropbox. Local data loss, of course, is still your responsibility.

And then, trying to understand further, I asked this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963768

So, I'll say that overall I've been pretty constructive. If anyone adopts my approach of storing their Dropbox folder in an unused drive they are almost guaranteed that Dropbox can't loose their data. That is worth money.

Please point me to a link or blog post with your immediate solutions to this problem. I'd love to compare notes. Maybe there's a better approach. Always interested in learning. I am sure there are lots of people who, tonight, might be interested in adopting your approach to ensuring that accidental data loss by a remote service of any kind does not mean total data loss locally.

Thanks.