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Can multiple people sign in with the same dropbox account and upload documents that can be accessed by anyone with the account username and password?
In the past, I was part of an organization at my school that wanted to find an easy way to upload and view study materials. Everyone in the organization had access to the username and password of the dropbox account, and what everyone would do is create a folder with a specific class name and upload materials inside the folder that could be viewed by everyone else who had access to the username and password. We thought this was easier than sharing folders (since our organization had 100+ people). But after a while we noticed that content inside different folders would just disappear. I really want to figure out what went wrong for future reference. Why did the files just disappear? Is it not possible to have several people share a dropbox account?
3 Replies
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- Mark
Super User II
Why did the files just disappear?
Somebody removed or deleted them. But as everybody has 1 account you'll never know who as they will all list as the same person.
Is it not possible to have several people share a dropbox account?
It is possible, yes, but a security nightmare - and causes issues above.
Every individual person technically 'owns' the account. So they could change the password/email or delete files at will and nobody else could do anything about that.
Hi Mark the Super User,
You can keep saying that somebody deleted the files but thats just not true.
We (and many others) have the same issue.. 3 people signed in under the same account.
Yesterday 1,5 Gb mysteriously disappeared randomly from our folders..
I ask you; is it possible to work with several users under one account or not?
- Rich
You can keep saying that somebody deleted the files but thats just not true.
Yes, it is true. Dropbox is not capable of deleting files on its own. Either someone with access to the account or some other process on their computer had to initiate the deletion. Usually this is because someone does a drag and drop thinking they're copying the files but actually end up moving them, or a result of some clean-up process running on the computer. Simply put, Dropbox did not (and cannot) delete the files. One of your users or a process on their computer did.
After you recover one of the files, look at the previous version history for that file and it will show you the name of the device (in parenthesis) that initiated the deletion.
I ask you; is it possible to work with several users under one account or not?
As Mark stated above:
It is possible, yes, but a security nightmare - and causes issues above.
