Don't use Dropbox

[tim]

If Condoleezza Rice being on the board of directors wasn't enough for you, if their employees literally bullying children in San Francisco wasn't enough for you, hear me out here. I'm currently permanently locked out of my Dropbox account containing years' worth of photos because a phone repair place destroyed my phone and I had 2-factor authentication enabled. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess!

Other services, such as pobox.com, will reset 2FA if you send them a notarized letter proving your identity. Not Dropbox, though! Here's the response I received from their support team when I asked the following:

I'm surprised by this response, since pobox.com was able to reset my 2FA when I sent them a notarized letter confirming my identity. Is there a reason that Dropbox wouldn't be able to accept such a letter from me as proof of my identity?

And here's the response I received:

Hello Tim,

Thanks for getting back to me! Apologies for the delay in my response- I had passed along your request to several of my teammates to look into as well. Unfortunately, we have no method to verify your identity and disable two-step verification if you do not have any of the following:

1. a linked computer or mobile device
2. your 16-digit emergency backup code
3. a backup phone number on file that can receive text messages

As noted, for security purposes, if you can't enter the six-digit code from your phone, and you didn't store the 16-digit emergency backup code, we have no way to help you regain access to your Dropbox account. We can't turn off two-step verification for you because email alone is no longer sufficient to prove your identity. The best we can do is help you make a new account and transfer any paid credit and bonus space you've earned. But we can't transfer any files.

If you create a new account, please reply with that account's email address so that I can help you further.

Dropbox doesn't care about your data. They will deny access to your data because they're too lazy to open a letter from a paying customer. If you don't think that's okay, don't use Dropbox. (By the way, can anyone recommend a cloud backup service that cares about customer data?)

Comments

[shimakaze_kun]

I don't know if it meets your other needs for but rsync.net is a cloud backup service that IME meets "cares about customer data". I locked myself out after I messed up replacing .ssh/authorized_keys (after my laptop got stolen) and they fixed the issue about 20 minutes after I emailed them on a Friday night -- their service and support has been excellent.

[tim]

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll check them out.

[azurelunatic]

Ugh, that's basically my worst nightmare of storage.

[tim]

Dropbox makes your dreams come true!

[azurelunatic]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BQn31eGCIAAE-pw.jpg:large

[tim]

Accurate.

[someonefromthewater]

Wow, that's... really bad and thank you for the heads-up. (seriously, getting locked out of stuff all the time should be pretty common, and you can send photo ID or some form of identity proof; it's not that hard. they don't even answer why a notarized letter wouldn't work, just that "email isn't secure". really not okay.)

(the startup I'm working for uses Dropbox and I don't think it'd be possible to switch. but with multiple people in a shared folder it *hopefully* is less of an issue.)

[megpie71]

Can't recommend any of them, because I don't use them (I have this deep-seated dislike of the notion that my data can be rendered unreachable or unusable by the failure of a computer I don't even know about; I blame it on too much time working IT Support), and given my partner works for one here in Australia (and therefore shares with me the horror stories of his day-to-day workplace) I have no plans to start.

If I did choose one, I'd probably be picking one reasonably local to me, so I could go into their office in person and be aggressively polite at the staff in person, complete with a bundle of ID such as my driver's licence (with photo), my bank statements, Medicare card, power bills etc (the standard Australian "100 points" needed to establish identity with various government services), should the worst happen (doesn't matter about the cost, quality, or standards of the service - I just want the in-person complaints resolution facility; this is an advantage when I have plenty of time and nothing to do with it, and they generally don't). This is, of course, another factor for me against using US-based (or even eastern-Australian-based) online services - lack of ability to go in to the office in person for complaint resolution.

(My partner and I strongly recommend the "going in to their office and taking up space being a very polite, but very determinedly Unhappy Customer right there in person" approach for getting problems resolved. Companies generally don't like it if they can't put you on hold, call you back, or send you off on a wild goose chase to escape their responsibility. So if you show up in person, are relentlessly polite but quietly determined to get your problem resolved, and show no hesitation in letting them know you'll stay there as long as is needed to get the problem resolved, they generally crumple within about twenty minutes, plus resolution time).

[flippac]

I keep meaning to set up the media server at home (...trust me, I spend enough time stuck here) to take regular backups of my not-very-big Dropbox folder[1]. But a technical kludge after the event isn't much good to anyone, and I'm mostly using them for the sync tools rather than as backup.

[1] It comes to something when you're safe calling uncompressed audio renders "small", but still. Source for all my creative output goes there.