From Lover to Hater of Dropbox

Until 9 months ago I loved Dropbox. It is unbelievably convenient. My machines and phone are all synced. I am a power user of three laptops plus my phone. I have over 160GB of data stored and use the Packrat offering so nothing is deleted.

Let me change the first sentence. Until last week I loved Dropbox. About nine months ago I started having random restores of data that filled my account. Four times I had to clean up 30-50GB of data. Each time I thought it was a glitch and just dealt with it because I LOVED DROPBOX. However, last week it got worse. Everytime I would try to clean up it would restore more and more data. What do I mean by restore? Well let’s say I have a bunch of videos in a directory and move them to another directory. Let’s say I rename them as well. After several months Dropbox restores those files to the original directory. The one’s I moved and renamed are still in the new directory but now I have duplicates and both are taking up space. That’s what I mean by restores.

I opened an incident with support. It took two days for them to get back to me. When they did, it was just a canned response like this one: “We can say with confidence that this situation did not stem from any Dropbox issues. Dropbox users can choose to have files synced across their machines. In that case, all changes made on local machines, including deletions, are synced.” Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/professor-suffers-dropbox-nightmare-2013-9#ixzz39peTReNq Well I can’t say that in Heidi Kevoe-Feldman’s case it was Dropbox’s fault but I can absolutely tell you that in my case Dropbox is to blame. How do I know?

• My events on the website are showing corruption
• I no longer had the data that was restored to my account. It wasn’t on my machine any longer.
• My machine doesn’t have enough disk space to hold everything being restored.
• I never upload files via the website “they said I did”
• They are blaming machines for restoring data that no longer have Dropbox installed
• Major events “You added 1938 files and directories”, are taking place in the middle of the night when my machines are off

There are many other reasons but those are absolute. I’ve always had issues similar to this in the past. You delete a file and five minutes later it is back. You delete it again and the same thing happens. After the third delete it is usually gone. It’s not that my data is missing. It’s that it’s a mess. I’ve got over 100,000 files. Pictures, videos, documents, etc. If you scramble it all together it’s almost as bad as losing it. The most infruiating aspect of this is their lack of interest. They don’t read my messages back to them. They just send me another recommendation and tell me it’s my fault. Of course, you only get to hear from them once a day. I dont’ know what to do. I’m trying out Google Drive but it’s giving sync errors and telling me I don’t have rights to my files. It also keeps logging out. One thing I do know….Dropbox couldn’t care less about me or my data.