[joering2]

> Disabled accounts are not immediately deleted: We can work with Teams admins and users to sort out account issues and recover users’ files.

Wait a sec, does this mean when I delete my files they are ... not being deleted?

> We’ve contacted the OP to help resolve his case and are sorry for any pain this caused!

Great, good for him. So basically next time when I or others have problems with Dropbox, post a rant about it and pray it will get to #1 spot on HN to get customer support response? Ok, dully noted, thanks.

[napoleond]

Wait a sec, does this mean when I delete my files they are ... not being deleted?

This is true of almost every service on the internet. If it wasn't, whenever the only disk that had your account on it failed you would be absolutely livid about the fact that they never made any backups. (It is generally infeasible to purge backups of any deleted data, because they're stored in compressed blobs.)

[joering2]

> This is true of almost every service on the internet

can you back this claim up somehow? I recall Flicker losing bunch of profiles (photos) permanently because once its deleted, well its deleted.

What you are confusing is planned backups, in case of hard drive failure, and the fact that customer executed delete command and consent to get those files deleted. two different things.

[napoleond]

can you back this claim up somehow?

I don't know where to start collecting anecdotes and appeals to authority, but I shouldn't need to. See my parenthetical above--how would you go about digging through terabytes of compressed backups to find every instance of a single file and its corresponding database record so that you could delete it? It would be possible to engineer such a system, but in most cases it would be an extremely poor allocation of resources.

If you upload something to the internet and you want to be the only person who is ever able to pull it back out, you should encrypt it.

[abraham]

as I recall they managed to restore most of those photos.

[CamperBob2]

Ability to recover deleted files for up to 30 days is a prominently advertised feature of Dropbox. It would be unthinkable for them not to allow that, given how easily files can be lost by users who aren't familiar with how syncing works.

Look at all of the people who consider Dropbox a "backup" service, and imagine being the guy on the phone who has to explain that yes, actually, deleting a file on one system is supposed to delete it from all other clients.

I will say that this is a really interesting story, in that it illustrates how Dropbox, like all of the similar services on the market, is handy for many use cases but ideal for almost none. A service that's basically a "scriptable" Dropbox would be pretty compelling.

[1123581321]

I appreciate that they don't delete files because this lets them offer some convenient features related to backup, account history and uploading. The biggest reason not to delete concerns sharing. If I share a folder, share a file, then a user deletes the file from the folder, I want to be able to retrieve it as I've sometimes had to do. I don't want someone else to be able to irretrievably destroy it on the Dropbox server.

However, I agree that users should be able to delete a file from Dropbox' servers if the user, since the beginning of the file's life on Dropbox, had the only account possessing the file on Dropbox. The procedure should involve a lot of red warning buttons and re-entering of the account password. I think this should be possible because some files really are too sensitive to be shared, and I can see how they might accidentally be pasted or dropped into the Dropbox folder and instantly duplicated. If the file is dropped into a shared folder, then there is probably nothing to be done because obtaining multiple permissions to permanently delete a file would be so complex socially.