Some admins do I'm sure. We had to cancel Teams because of this. :(

Let me explain: most people at Steamclock sync personal stuff in their Dropbox, and we want to also share a large folder. Upgrading everybody to Teams seemed like a good idea, but the "company owns what's in your dropbox" thinking forced everybody to have two separate accounts, and the "only one account can sync to your computer at once" restriction makes one of your two Dropbox accounts fairly useless.

We can only go back to Teams is when multiple accounts can sync to one computer seamlessly. All the problems around DB for Teams (privacy and TOS issues, personal and company data getting mixed up, weird consequences when people leave the plan) are caused by the lack of multiple account sync.

That said, we'd be happy to just pay monthly for a shared folder that doesn't count against users' storage limits. In the meantime, we have the company Visa on a bunch of personal Dropbox accounts which sucks.

For personal use though Dropbox is great. Merry Chrismas!

Maybe I ran into some undocumented antipiracy feature as they were self made AVCHD videos of a few minutes length.

Google drive on the other hand just works.

First of all, in Dropbox's defense, I probably did not give you guys enough time to respond before going public with this (also, living in Israel I sometimes forget that Sunday is a weekend for most people in the world). I apologize for that. I am not a journalist/blogger, and I was driven more by my emotions than by "journalistic ethics" (?) when submitting to HN.

Second, according to your support email (updated the original post with it) it looks like my particular case is going to be resolved. However, it does not seem to resolve the malicious use case I hinted at (and which people on HN did not seem to want to discuss that much): Give someone a terabyte as a gift, and then delete their account. In fact, from the support email it seems like it's even worse: The support staff will need the team admin to approve the account re-enabling. In the malicious case, the admin would not approve.

[EDIT: Recalled a third point I wanted to make.] Third, regarding what you said "it's not possible for us to differentiate between Team data and personal stuff in the same account". I simply don't understand why this is true. Maybe the general case is not like mine, but my Dropbox folder just has a bunch of subfolders, exactly one of which belongs to the "team". Is it possible that certain folders have mixed personal-and-team content? How does that even work? If you saw my account (I don't know if you can... but your code can) it would be blatantly obvious which folders (all but one) are personal.

For most cases though, users should create a new account for the team. The Dropbox for Teams sign up process guides users towards creating a new account when joining a team for this reason.

If joining a team account changed after your October changes, then maybe it's okay now. But I included in my post the email I got for joining the team, and it makes no mention of the fact that the team admin now owns my data. One would think this email should be less bland and more cautioning.

If only your software actually worked in that scenario. Every single piece of your software is hard wired to believe you only have exactly one account. For example the Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS clients, as well as the website. To see your other account involves logouts and logging back in again having to enter the other account email and password (not saved).

> Users can quickly switch between using personal and Teams accounts on the web today

Huh, the only thing that works for me is to logout and log back in again. I have a personal paid account and a separate team account. What I would expect is how google do it - the account dropdown having your other logged in accounts available for selection.

The first time you select 'Switch Accounts' you will be able to log in your personal account. After that, you will be able to switch accounts without having to type the other username every time.

Why not just make 'Switch Account' always be present rather than having one blessed starting point account? The wording also implies this won't work if you have two team accounts.

I am really curious about this statement. Maybe you can explain a little further. I am thinking about something like this:

    git add .
    git commit -am "Account state prior to joining teams"
    
    git branch personal
    git branch team_x
    git branch team_y
    
    git checkout team_x
    git commit -am "Initial commit for team_x"
    git commit -am "Did some more work for team_x"
    
    git checkout team_y
    git commit -am "Initial commit for team_y"
    git commit -am "Did some more work for team_y"
    
    git checkout personal
    git commit -am "Added Dad folder for xmas pictures"

    git branch -D team_x
    git branch -D team_y
    

In other words, I am thinking that most of the heavy lifting required to manage the on-boarding and off-boarding of someone from teams, even multiple teams, is already done for your in the form of Git. Wrap it with some business-specific code and it could be really slick. Of course, that alone could be a six month project.

Anyhow, just seat-of-the-pants without much thought applied to it. Curious to hear your opinion.

I'd expect Teams to work like folder sharing, but with the storage not counting towards the individual account space limits.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

You won't have to combine to the Personal / Team together.

And make it so that the shared folders doesn't count towards the Individual's account space limit.

Bam. Problem solved (?)

The problem is, our shared folders DO count towards the individuals' space limits. So, we have seven people's personal Dropbox accounts on the company credit card. Not convinced this will scale.

It seems its a can of worms right now and the suitable fix seems to be removing the storage limit on shared folders (shared to those individuals who do not own the original folders being shared).

This may be way harder than I make it sound, since I don't know about the hurdles this would face. But that does seem like the place to aim.

http://www.dropboxwiki.com/Multiple_Instances_On_Unix

http://theterran.com/blog/2012/6/14/use-two-dropbox-accounts...

The second link is basically a modification of the method from the first link, and has been working well for me for a few weeks. One caveat is that any apps which make us of dropbox for syncing (e.g. 1Password) seem to automatically use the first/normal dropbox instance, which can't be changed.

Of course it's possible. You just don't want to put the work in it make it happen.

I am going to be blunt here and just say it: the 'Team admins will have control over the account' part is completely stupid and not well thought through.

Becoming part of a team should be about sharing data. Not about handing over accounts.

On Linux, I've gone out of my way to install the (pseudo-unsupported?) daemon headless under multiple users to get concurrent access to work and person accounts; would like to see this improve (while dealing with the "I have ten free accounts" and other pathological cases).

On the backend, this would involve converting all current accounts into "sub-accounts". Joining a team would basically create a brand new sub-account under the same login.

IMHO Dropbox should not count Team shared files onto each member. Let the admin pay the bills.

Well, I guess that's a start...