[JohnHaugeland]

Client rigor doesn't help with server failure this severe.

The guy lost everything because a temporary team membership was revoked. And now you're coming back to talk about your rigor, and how you catch things that fall through the cracks.

This really comes off, to me at least, like LinkedIn did when after their breach and it was revealed they weren't even salting passwords, they tried to brag about their security, as a way to step around owning up.

I think you should consider this tone very carefully.

[zaidf]

Completely disagree. I found no problems with the tone here. Instead, you have an insider who shares a few implementation details to give us an idea about the depth at which they go to prevent data loss failures. I saw nothing in his post as "bragging".

The guy lost everything because a temporary team membership was revoked.

What would you like him to do, apologize profusely and robotically without knowing the details of this incident? Dropbox is a decent-sized organization and I am pretty sure they have guys already responsible for addressing specific issues like this. To expect every employee to know details of every issue seems unreasonable.

[JohnHaugeland]

> What would you like him to do, apologize

If you had stopped there, I'd have said yes.

.

> To expect every employee to know details of every issue

I ... had no such expectation?

[ghshephard]

John - take a second to read the comment. He was providing feedback on a scenario in which a machine which had not been powered up in a long time apparently deleted files because they were not present. The Dropbox model does not allow this - you can only delete files that are already on your hard disk. This, is what he was trying to explain to the parent poster. His tone was entirely appropriate.

[kamkazemoose]

He's replying to edanm, who had another problem, and not the blog author. His comment is more relevant to edanm's problem and I think it's fine.

[JohnHaugeland]

... whoooooooops.

Sorry. Thanks for explaining. `:(`

[jsmeaton]

I believe he was referring to the claim that switching on an old computer that hadn't been synced in awhile deleted tens of thousands of files. Not the original post.

[JohnHaugeland]

Quite right. My bad.