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Safeguard data on sudden drive-failure to avoid accidental deletions
The following issue cannot get solved by using any setting inside Dropbox or by external precautions – such as alerts on OS-level. Staff should find a support ticket on the problem I describe. A few months ago, we ran into a sudden mass deletion of all Dropbox data. It turned out that the reason was trivial – and that the same could happen again any day. An M2 SSD drive screwed into a Laptop didn’t sit perfectly tight in its slot and its pins had lost contact. This drive was used for Dropbox (local storage). Dropbox interpreted this loss of contact with the drive as full deletion and silently nuked all files we store on Dropbox (in Cloud + all attached machines). Technically, it's the same data loss you'll experience when you unplug an external drive with Dropbox running while the machine on. As we work with large files, we run Dropbox in a fashion that leaves all data on local machines and cloud-syncs it. Whenever a drive fails, it will therefore erase all Dropbox data. Rollbacks via Dropbox may help recover data. Yet, nothing can protect our Dropbox volume (hundreds of GB) from getting cleared in the first place. Any app or website that references data stored on Dropbox obviously would get affected by full data removal. This could cause substantial initial damage (blank pages, due to missing data) and likely lots of clean-up-work (once data got recovered). We already considered options to sniff out unexpected directory write operations – here's a Microsoft tool one may use on Windows. Such a tool, however, even when perfectly configured (shuts down local Dropbox when self-destruction is detected) would only rescue Dropbox data on local machines. Any 3rd party references to Dropbox data would still break – as they plug into Dropbox Cloud storage, which still gets nuked when a drive suddenly dies or disconnects. We would therefore like to see a mechanism for paid Dropbox tiers that kicks in, as soon as a computer logged into Dropbox issues the deletion of the full Dropbox volume. Dropbox should stop executing this command on its cloud instance and all drives machines it still can access and ask Admins (via E-Mail / Push Message), how it should proceed: A computer logged into this acount has requested to delete all files on Dropbox. The name of this machine is [“human-readable Computer Name”], Would you like to proceed? If yes, please enter your Dropbox Password. ⚠ This message may also get caused by a hardware error on the computer in question. As long as you do not confirm by entering your Dropbox password, no data will be deleted in the cloud or on connected computers. Enter password to delete all Dropbox data | Cancel delete operation Please consider this addition. It requires practically no GUI and would not introduce workflow changes. Yet, this little change would bring Dropbox data integrity to the next level.
Option to go back to a specific time, not just a date in Dropbox Rewind
I love the rewind feature, it has saved me multiple times but it's usability is horrible. I use dropbox as my working folder for development work, so in a matter of minutes there can be thousands of modified files. If I want to rewind to let's say one hour earlier, this is practically impossible. The only option right now is to scroll though the list of modified files in the rewind side panel, few files at a time, it takes so long to do this that the only option is to rewind to an earlier day. Why can't there simply be an option to select a time to rewind to? Its incredible how such simple features are not obvious to the drobox user interface developers
User restrictions on bulk deletion or moving
It would be great if it were possible to set a user so they cannot perform bulk deletions or moves of files. One of the users, who does not have admin rights, accidentally moved a folder with 350,000 files. As a result, we lost the functionality of the links when returning the folder back. It would therefore be great if some users could be restricted so that it is not possible to move or delete files beyond a certain quota.