A few posts back I wrote about a Dropbox disaster. To be fair, on many occasions Dropbox can save us as from our own mistakes.
I was talking about it with a friend who wanted to close Dropbox account and took these steps:
- Opened Dropbox webpage and logged in.
- Deleted all the files stored on Dropbox.
- Then he uninstalled the client from his computer.
Only to realise that all the files were deleted on his computer as well! Fortunately Dropbox keeps the backup for 30 days and he was able to restore all his files.
Although I wrote that cloud storage can save us from our own mistakes the blame for what happened here is partly also in how Dropbox is designed. I suppose the designers haven’t predicted all possible user actions and they just expect (as many times) the user to understand the cores of the technology. If one deletes everything on the website a BIG RED waning should be in place :).
Another friend shared this story. A night before submitting his thesis he permanently deleted it by accident (thinking about another file) from his Dropbox folder. He opened a website and realised that it was deleted there too. Only a few moments later he found a bin on the website and restored.
And I was able to get an old version of a file once after I have deleted a substantial part of the content.
…
As there are plenty of Dropbox related disasters covered online, there are plenty of stories of Dropbox helping to recover from a disaster:
Just don’t let the cloud storage be your only backup!
