Warning about Dropbox

I've used Dropbox for years and pay the annual subscription so I was shocked when, for the first time ever, I had to use their Rewind feature.

I had an emergency (which can happen to any of us) and needed to rewind my laptop by one hour so as to recover weeks worth of work that I had otherwise lost.

I wasn't worried as I knew everything was backed up on my Dropbox account and the Rewind feature would let me rewind by an hour.

So when I clicked on the link to rewind I was a bit worried when I just got an error message that said to contact Dropbox support. I did that and asked them if they could rewind by one hour, but for some weird reason, which nobody would explain to me, that wasn't possible.

Instead, support send me over several lists of files, but none of them had time stamps on so I didn't know whether they were the older ones or newer ones. They asked me to choose which list of file to go back to. The worrying thing is this was just a random list of files and made little sense as they were not word docs, they were things like .ico files and random numbers.

I needed to recover what I'd lost urgently and so ended up choosing one. Alas, I didn't choose perfectly and so lost the work I had done that morning.

Now, 24 hours later, I figured I'd go in and see if this Rewind was working now, and guess what. I got the error again. I've tested it on two Macs and on Firefox and Chrome and same error on each one.

I've spent hours on with Dropbox support trying to explain that Dropbox is a SAAS and so the error is clearly at their end as it is the Dropbox site I am on and it is the same error on different machines and different browsers.

My reason for posting this is that us digital nomads and budding entrepreneurs need to know are data is 100% safe and secure. Many of us have relied on Dropbox for years and trusted that in the event of an emergency they'd have our backs and get us up and running within a few minutes. Alas it turns out Dropbox cannot be trusted with our important data and the restoration of that data via their Rewind feature, which they use as a major selling point on their sales page.

Here is what the blurb on Dropbox says about the Rewind feature:

"With Rewind, fixing big accidents with the content in your account is easy. Just sign in to dropbox.com and restore your entire account to what it looked like before the mishap. You’ll be able to pick the exact point in time you need to revert your account to and undo everything that went wrong all at once. After rewinding your files or account, it will be as if the accident never occurred. Your recovered files will sync to all your linked devices, and you can breathe a sigh of relief."

In my experience most of this proved to be completely untrue. I wasn't able to just sign-in and do this, I had to go via support. I wasn't able to pick the 'exact point' I was just given random lists of files to choose from (scary but true). After restoring the files I was in a mess as half of what I needed had not been restored correctly. As for breathing a sigh of relief, not a chance. I was pulling my hair out with frustration.

Below is a screenshot showing the error is still there 24 hours later and Dropbox have done absolutely nothing to fix it. I have just been on live chat with them for over an hour and it is genuinely as if they just don't care.

That's why I figured I should warn you good peeps on Indie Hackers as these things can be business killers. It is just a good job I wasn't heading into a big pitch to investors as otherwise I would have been well and truly in the brown stuff.