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Alternatives to Dropbox for Business?

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  1. #1

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    Alternatives to Dropbox for Business?

    Yesterday morning Dropbox wound back our account to a point in November - without asking - meaning we lost TB worth of data. We work in Dropbox and while I personally keep a Time Machine backup of all my stuff, for staff whose projects are not under me, we were stuffed. You cannot get support for Dropbox during HK office hours, so my IT guy got onto them as soon as the US opened.... and they were USELESS.

    Needless to say, we will be ditching them.

    But that's not an easy task, nor do we really have any idea where to move.

    We are a great fan of cloud services and syncing. Our IT person is based in NZ and our HK guy is just one of our staff who likes dabbling in technical stuff - we really don't want to have to install a server and figure out how to use it! We have some desire for privacy but are not anal about it (most of the alternatives I have seen focus on encryption rather than ease of use - its not a prime focus for us, although we need it to be reasonable).

    We basically need everything Dropbox for Business currently provides, but ideally 24 hour customer service as well.

    I have tried searching for alternatives for dropbox, asian based dropbox, etc etc. There seem to be millions of alternatives and everyone is pushing their own favourite with it being almost impossible to tell if they are paid reviewers or what.

    There are people on here I know are very tech savvy and whose opinions I trust. So if you have any suggestions, please let me know. If you prefer to do so privately, please send a PM.

    Thanks in advance for any help.


  2. #2

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    PS - I should add - I have a pathological hatred of Microsoft and all related products. We may end up there, but not if there is any chance of finding something else!


  3. #3

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    They rewound your account? How is it even possible for then to do that? As a dropbox user I'm a bit worried myself now


  4. #4

    Seriously? No backup? It's your IT guy who's the problem. I'd never trust the Cloud to such a level.

    jrkob likes this.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by justjoe86:
    They rewound your account? How is it even possible for then to do that? As a dropbox user I'm a bit worried myself now
    Backup now.

  6. #6

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    Google drive?

    We run our business pretty much exclusively on Google apps / servers, so perhaps that seems like the most logical solution to me, but might not be appropriate for you.


  7. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by civil_servant:
    Seriously? No backup? It's your IT guy who's the problem. I'd never trust the Cloud to such a level.
    Our IT guy is not full time and we have been working with him on a backup solution, but it's not been finalised yet. Yes I'm annoyed its taken this long but such is life. Life happens. As I mentioned, personally I was backed up... and by default that meant about 3/4 of everything else was too. Just not 100%..... we grew a lot in the last year. We are now 5x the size we were 5 years ago.....We are trying to play catch-up with our admin support....this is not unknown in small companies LOL.
    civil_servant and spode like this.

  8. #8

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    Quote Originally Posted by justjoe86:
    They rewound your account? How is it even possible for then to do that? As a dropbox user I'm a bit worried myself now
    One of our users (a complete dickwit when it comes to IT) managed to delete a bunch of files in November. We recovered most of them, but didnt realise some were still missing. On 22 December, the missing files were discovered and we were unable to recover them manually. We asked Dropbox to recover the missing files, but not touch anything else. We got an email from them yesterday saying they were unable to recover any files as it was more than 30 days (despite the fact we pay for unlimited recovery). About 2 hours later they wound back the account.

    Who knows what happened. I suspect someone in the US was trying to be "helpful". They probably suddenly realised we pay for unlimited recovery and hit a button to "recover" but chose the wrong option .... or something. God knows. We don't. We are getting "standard" emails from them with "standard" recovery tips that don't work because the event log doesn't show what happened. We spent an hour on a conference call at the crack of dawn this morning and we are STILL not speaking to anyone useful or getting any help.

    It's utterly pathetic. We are paying for the business service, we are using it the way its supposed to be used and Dropbox is now pretty much the largest provider of this kind of stuff. I'm guessing they grew too fast too.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by HK_Katherine:
    One of our users (a complete dickwit when it comes to IT) managed to delete a bunch of files in November. We recovered most of them, but didnt realise some were still missing. On 22 December, the missing files were discovered and we were unable to recover them manually. We asked Dropbox to recover the missing files, but not touch anything else. We got an email from them yesterday saying they were unable to recover any files as it was more than 30 days (despite the fact we pay for unlimited recovery). About 2 hours later they wound back the account.

    Who knows what happened. I suspect someone in the US was trying to be "helpful". They probably suddenly realised we pay for unlimited recovery and hit a button to "recover" but chose the wrong option .... or something. God knows. We don't. We are getting "standard" emails from them with "standard" recovery tips that don't work because the event log doesn't show what happened. We spent an hour on a conference call at the crack of dawn this morning and we are STILL not speaking to anyone useful or getting any help.

    It's utterly pathetic. We are paying for the business service, we are using it the way its supposed to be used and Dropbox is now pretty much the largest provider of this kind of stuff. I'm guessing they grew too fast too.
    Keep up the pressure.

  10. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by civil_servant:
    Seriously? No backup? It's your IT guy who's the problem. I'd never trust the Cloud to such a level.

    Plenty of companies do. But I think we may need two Clouds.... or something. Actually my Time Machine backup was AWESOME. We got a lot of what we needed within minutes. So in the interim we have set up an old Mac with a very large external drive and it's own Dropbox to be backed up. But in the longer term we need something better.

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