Safeguard data on sudden drive-failure to avoid accidental deletions

Hi Walter,

I wish you at Dropbox staff established different ways to deal with technical level feedback. What I brought forward would save every user in a comparable situation from temporary loss of all data – and all the work and damage associated with it.

Avoiding this potential data loss would make Dropbox better for everyone. Yet, it's naive to expect to collect numerous votes in an end-user forum. Someone could suggest a killer-tweak that would double your app-performance on all platforms – but that post would gather dust here. 

Thanks for your reply and for the status change, @Nancy I'm looking forward to hearing from you again.

As you refer to external drives in your post, I want to clarify – we never ran Dropbox on a removable device. I am aware that Dropbox discourages doing so in its documentation.

We ran into sudden failure of an internal drive (see also my initial post). Such may happen with premium hardware and with all good practices applied. It may happen to you too, Nancy, as it might happen to anyone on earth who has Dropbox installed.

This being said – the code addition I suggested would even save those who run Dropbox on external hard drives. It would make anyone's Dropbox experience safer.

 

We did not receive a message from the Dropbox app that informs about unusual file writing activities. Yet, any alert that hundreds or thousands of GB already got deleted comes too late anyway. The horse at that point already left the barn.

 

We live in a world where petabytes of cloud data are embedded into apps, fuel websites and drive data feeds of all sorts. Dropbox promotes data embedding through its official integrations, and you also provide users with an API to build custom data connectors.

 

An inevitable consequence of embedding cloud data in 3rd party software is that one has to bid goodbye to the idea that temporary data loss causes no harm. As a customer service employee, you can safely remove this sentence from your repertoire.

 

Data recovery is the very least the service provider can do – but the promise that data is recoverable is not comforting to business customers – and it certainly does not make up for the damage caused.

***
One last and often forgotten aspect is completely pointless data transfer and its carbon footprint. We run Dropbox in full local mode and have good reasons to do so. In our setup, all files are stored on local machines. Most of our files are larger than 100 MB, and we constantly write metadata into file descriptions (without actually opening files). If we open files, we batch process them. There's no time to wait for file-downloads to complete.

When Dropbox deleted all our files on all machines, due to hardware failure on a single machine, data recovery meant having to re-download hundreds of gigabytes to a few local computers. Our non-default setup, however, does not change anything I said above. Temporary data loss from a fully remote account can cause just as much damage, as for customers with a local work-mode.

I hope you can soon offer a fix that avoids this from happening to other customers. And it would be great to see Dropbox display the same mentality, as the inventors of the safety belt. Happy Holidays!

Hi everyone,

We’re happy to share that we’ve addressed the issue where sudden drive failures could lead to accidental deletions in Dropbox. With this fix, Dropbox now better detects and handles unexpected drive failures to prevent unintended file deletions or data loss.

What's improved?

• Dropbox now recognizes sudden drive failures more reliably and avoids interpreting them as intentional deletions.
• If a drive disconnects or fails unexpectedly, Dropbox will pause sync rather than removing local and cloud-stored files.
  
  

This improvement ensures your files remain safe even in cases of hardware issues. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback—it played a crucial role in shaping this update.