No additional space on Business Advanced

[ggtello]

Dear community,

I'm here to advice that the support have been denying us additional space for two weeks, first telling us that there was a momentary problem, then that we had made a request before the 7 days, then again (after waiting 7 days) that there is a problem which however is not written by Nowhere.

We're really worried about that because they don't give us any timelines and the fact that the problem doesn't exist on the dropbox status page and that nobody else talks about it seems a bit suspicious.

I don't like writing these posts but we are really worried don't you think? Are any of you having similar problems? do they only have it with us?

[OfficeInCT]

@cgi_ltd  It all depends how frequently you're accessing the data. For example, 600TB in cold archive would be $600 per month, $7200 per year. But then if you needed to recover all 600TB that would be very expensive. How many TB would you say you need immediate access to?

[Eldon McGuinness]

I can't say there is a national provider, I generally take a look at what is closest to the client and go from there. That being said, most datacenters offer some kind of intervention service if it is an emergency. This could be useful if your drive to the datacenter is a bit much, just depends on what your time is worth. 😄

I tend to ask a couple of simple questions up front:

• Do they offer hardware installation services, if so, what is the cost and do they allow to have hardware shipped to their location for them to install.
• What is their SLA for interventions as well as cost.
• What are their access hours for on premises visits.

This should give you a good idea of what you're in for and if you cannot get out there, what your options are. Most places I work with will allow me to have parts shipped to them and they will install them for a very small fee, well below what I would charge to drive to said location and install it. Pair this with IP based KVM and you should be able to do just about anything without going to the datacenter.

@cgi_ltd Even those prices are a bit high for my liking, glacier type storage is an option, but when you take into consideration that take out/egress pricing, it is a ripoff.

[Rootax]

For the record, I received this email from Dropbox :

" In order to continue providing all Dropbox customers with a reliable storage experience and to keep pace with growing demand, we’re making some changes to our Dropbox Advanced plan.
Rest assured that there are no changes to your price for Dropbox Advanced, your service, or your data access.
Under our “as much space as you need” Advanced plan, we’ve found that a growing number of customers were buying Advanced subscriptions for non-business purposes. We’ve seen a surge of this behavior in recent months in the wake of other services making similar storage policy changes. We’ve observed that customers like these frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers. As a result, we’re sunsetting the “as much space as you need” policy and transitioning to a metered model. We’re committed to making the transition as seamless as possible for our customers and ensuring they have the solutions they need to do their best work on Dropbox.
What’s happening

• Your Dropbox Advanced plan will transition on November 27, 2023.

• Your price for Advanced will not change, and there are no changes to your service or data access.

• Under our Advanced plan’s updated storage policy, three active licenses will receive 15TB of storage space shared by the team—enough space to store about 100 million documents, 4 million photos or 7500 hours of HD video. Each additional active license will receive 5TB of storage, up to 1,000TB.

• When your team transitions to this new plan, your account will likely be over quota.
  What you need to do

• Before November 20, 2023, please book a personalized session with our team [here]  so that we can discuss your plan options. The scheduling link is also available in your [Dropbox account].
  Thank you,The Dropbox team"

So, it seems they don't even wait for the end of our subscription. Since I won't pay more, I guess we'll be unable to upload more data from November 27th. I hope we'll have still access in read only....

[cgi_ltd]

I received a similar e-mail, however with my account in the several tb's range, I had no option to "book" an appointment to speak with them. It just said the transition is coming in November and nothing will change till Novemeber of 2024

[Rootax]

We're over 200tb here... 

[clintwb]

Would love to know where everyone stands with their total storage and what they use it for.  

We are a media company, so 150 TB is pretty solid actual usage.  We shoot film in 6k and 12k and single projects usually run 10TB or more. We are constantly sharing data between clients, each other and needing access while traveling so DB Advanced was a perfect tool for our business for a number of years.  We could trim that 150TB a little, but I dont feel like thats a crazy amount.  Their calculations on 15TB being fine for tons of documents at 7500 hours of "video" is calculating it off HD video... not 4k or 6k like we (and the rest of the industry) has been shooting and delivering in for 8+ years.  15TB would hold all of about 20 hours of 6K video.... Come-On Dropbox.  Dont make all of us suffer because a few users are using thousands of TB or PB of data with mining etc... 

I have personally helped sign up dozens of people since dropbox launched and I was a first-year account holder, pretty bad way to treat long-term and VERY loyal customers who have built businesses around your products and have SIGNED CONTRACTS with you that you are choosing to not honor. 

Anyone else in a similar boat? 

[danblaze]

Everything is tough.
I'm not a long time Dropbox customer, in fact, I "migrated" from Google after their hard drive policy changed. Some of you may think, "Oh, it's people like you who joined that caused Dropbox to change its policy", but that's not true.
After Dropbox changed their policy so drastically, I was forced to lease a few storage servers and buy bandwidth to set up a storage cluster with an American company that I had been working with for a while.
Honestly, as tough as it was, there was still a way I could afford it - it was an outlay of almost $800 per month. But the biggest stress isn't even the money, it's the fact that you have to reconfigure a set of things, and face a lot of maintenance costs.
It was such an ugly solution, but I had to do it.
Dropbox's solution of adding users if you want more space is really too expensive, and it's several times more than my current solution.
I really don't know why Dropbox is doing this.

[OfficeInCT]

@clintwb How long have you been a member? Did you have a Business Services Agreement? 

[clintwb]

Member since 2009. One user for a lot of that time but as we grew we added users the past 4 or 5 years. Regardless, paying up front even a year at a time and then being told that what we paid for they will not give us anymore (less than half way through) is pretty messed up. 

[Eldon McGuinness]

Our company has a hot storage pool of almost 300TB currently, we also have a cold storage pool of almost 600TB. Most of the people that we consult with have 100TB or more of storage. I have migrated all of them, including our business to either a colocation- or local-hosting type situation. Dropbox thinks very highly of their toolset and honestly it is just not worth it for us nor any of our customers. Perhaps some people find it useful and worth the investment, but not us.