We’re Still Here to Help (Even Over the Holidays!) - find out more here.
Forum Discussion
No additional space on Business Advanced
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...
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 doBefore 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....
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?
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.clintwb How long have you been a member? Did you have a Business Services Agreement?
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.
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.
I would highly encourage users to NOT look at Dropbox as an Enterprise service. Nor Google Drive, nor Box.com, nor any of the other ones like that. Frame.IO is launching a service soon that allows users to connect S3 storage. IBM, Azure, Google Cloud are all better fits for storage.
- S3 storage tends to be on the expensive side, when you consider the amount it costs just for the storage, not to mention any ingress or egress fees to pull/push data to them.
That's true it does, but situations like this are less likely to arise. Always the trade off: speed or cost or quality.
Don't bother, just host your own service and make your own s3 storage on it.
If you want some info on this let me know.
Yeah, lot of companies going back to on-prem. 45Drives has their Storinator as an option for people https://www.45drives.com/products/storinator-xl60-configurations.php
- Does that include drives? Didn't seem to note that it did. Though, maybe I can't see it on the mobile view. Looks like they need a web developer...
Eldon McGuinness Doesn't include drives, but purpose built and solid customer service.
- 13k and no drives?! That is crazy. Maybe Dropbox is doing business with these guys, would explain the plan price change LOL.
eBay has TONS of used enterprise storage devices. Plenty that won't break the bank and and can be configured how you want it. Install whatever OS you want in it and throw a 10gb SFP card in it, for example;
https://www.ebay.com/itm/154728911136?var=454821194443Indeed, I recommend people to take a look there, if they're ok with the associated risks, first.
This is very similar to my experience... promise "as much as you need", then cavalierly say, oh only 5TB per user. No price reduction. They are truly an unethical company...
Eldon McGuinness - What have you been migrating to? We have QNAP NAS/DAS systems in our offices but for such a small company its hard for us to keep up with getting everything to always sync and DB has always just been a good solution for us for a number of reasons. The ability to selectively sync to our local machines (media company here, 12k video files are really much easier to edit via DAS or our editing computer's hard drive) so we would sync the current project down, then sync it back up - and then could do the same to share between editors in different locations etc and occasionally with clients.
Still trying to decide how to respond... hoping Dropbox will do the right thing if there is enough press. It is a good fit for the same reasons - remote editing, upload sources, download remotely for work, then archive online until revisions are needed. We eventually put older projects on hard drives locally and remove from Dropbox, but file sizes and project files are much larger than they used to be. Very, very disappointing.
I will soon be evaluating local storage options. I imagine that we will ultimately find a solution that allows more control and customization than Dropbox anyway. And never suffer throttling again. We'll have some time spend managing it, but Dropbox and its arrogance is history. Hopefully the media gets into this and talks about their false advertising, bait-n-switch, unethical ... and possibly illegal behavior.- I asked Support about the changes and how I am affected .
They are unable to give clear answers. They are referring to the blog post and in the next sentence they say the exact opposite..
I asked them multiple Times to give me clear answers as i have to plan how i proceed with my Business and at some point they just ignored me and havent replied to my Mails since.
This is just riddicolous . - They are respecting the information provided on the blog. For us over 5 TB for user we're going to expire in one year of grace period because after we need to pay other users for reach our quota and/or buy storage space. Local storage is the only way for us. Only docs, PC/phone backup are feasible on the new cloud provider trend.
Well I'm trying to reply to you clintwb with detail on our setup, however, the posts are mysteriously not staying put...
It's because they're deleting posts and comments that speak about this.
Yes, the posts keep moving… and the thread is difficult to find. Why? It seems like they are moving things around or obscuring this thread…
Always funny when companies put the final nail in their own coffin themselves. Lovely.
Bye Dropbox, the pleasure's been all yours.
Our organisation has been using 45 TB of dropbox storage already before this policy was changed. I am using Dropbox Business Advances since 2019. I paid for the number of users and I had unlimited storage. As of Oct 2023, we utilised 45 TB of storage based on the earlier plan and policy offered to me.
I reached out to DB customer service and none of them seem to give me any solution.
The fact is there was a commitment that was given to us when before and we have been using Dropbox based on that. Now there is a change in DB's policy. We understand that and are okay with paying for any additional storage we need. But asking us to pay for the already used space of 45 TB is not good.
What happened to DB's earlier commitment to ‘use as much space as you need’ policy which was given to us earlier?
