So it begins, when it's too good to be true, it is. Just got the email below from LayerOnline.
I have a feeling this will also begin the start of kicking many other accounts.
Last night we just got the dreaded email from Dropbox:
Hi LayerOnline,
This is a notification from Dropbox to inform you that your account has been identified as selling Dropbox Services without authorization and/or using the Services to back up, or as infrastructure for, your own cloud services.
Selling, reselling, or leasing Dropbox’s Services is against our Acceptable Use Policy and Services Agreement. Using the Services to back up, or as infrastructure for, your own cloud services is against Dropbox’s Acceptable Use Policy.
Your account will be shut down pursuant to Dropbox’s Acceptable Use Policy and Terms of Service or Services Agreement, as applicable. You have 30 days to remove any files from your Dropbox account that you wish to preserve. Once your account is shut down, you will lose access to all files stored in this account, and it will not be restored.
You can find more information about our policy in our Help Center. If you feel that you received this message in error, please reach out to our support team at www.dropbox.com/help.
- The Dropbox Team
It mentioned 30 days but it's likely less than two weeks, as our monthly contract ends July 24. We recommend that you move your data out before July 24. We started this journey when our Workspace users were looking for a place to migrate their data. We contacted Dropbox and they were happy to help. It has been rough since the beginning, unable to allocate space, not clear about the amount of space can be used, etc. and eventual death.
This is probably the end of unlimited cloud storage era. The only solution we see right now is to setup your own NAS, and backup using services such as CrashPlan or BackBlaze.
As you know Dropbox doesn't offer refunds and we have incurred all the cost. We understand that we offer refunds and we will honor that, refunds will be send out in the following days. But if refund is not needed please simply reply to this message by tomorrow. A big thank you to you all.
If you have any questions or concerns please let us know."
this is actually very good news:) hopefully it will make all market more affordable for people who need online storage with fair prices. At the moment it is skewed both by companies offering "unlimited" and people "abusing" it with petabytes of plex collections.
LO was simply bigger abuser than ppl paying $20 for GD and keeping 'petabytes' of data, success it lasted so long. I wouldn't even try to comment on these huge amount of plex collections...
yeah - but these things take time. Big guys like Google or Dropbox were loosing money but gaining customers. Whatever their reason was it made all online storage market to stall - it is commodity now and you can't win customers by any fancy features - only by price. Sooner it gets back to normal competition better - there are enough players out there to make price realistic. At the moment it is like $4 per TB/per month. Which IMHO is too much - you can get 20TB disk for $400 (cheaper in bulk) - it has guarantee for 5 years. You need more space to provide redundancy and pay for operational cost. But nowadays market charges $5000 for 5 years for 20 TB. I have a feeling that there is space out there for somebody to offer it cheaper.
The basic steps I did: (All this was using the dropbox web interface)
In your layeronline dropbox account create a new folder eg: transfers
Share this folder with your own dropbox account, as far as I can remember it did warn about the email of the other account not being in the team, but did not stop me sharing it. You may need to follow the link dropbox sends you when a folder is shared with you to get it to show up in your own dropbox account.
Then when logged in to your layeronline dropbox account via the web, move folder(s) into the transfers folder (use move not copy) and wait.
Once the move has completed, login to your own dropbox account move the folder(s) out of the shared folder to wherever you want them.
But as I said it can take a while, so I suggest limiting the amount you move each time.
Is there a prerequisite for that? Like your new dropbox account should have free space of the size of your layeronline space? For example if I have 25 TB on layeronline, my new advanced dropbox account should be minimum that size, correct?
If you use a separate shared folder as I suggested, then (I think) there must be enough free space on your own dropbox account to accommodate whatever you move to the shared folder.
B2 is still a good (and better depending on your use case) deal. I asked about it on reddit and a C-Level exec replied that they have no plans to increase cost.
iDrive E2 is also cheaper than both. I haven't use them.
(I also am personally voting with my wallet on Wasabi because of their 90-day shenanigans)
What remains to be seen is whether the other minimum-3-person-setups might also be identified as "using the Services to back up" soon. At least to me it is to be expected, after this.
Also, it will be interesting to see if Dropbox' current 10TB/week/team account growth limitation is sustainable for them (Reddit - Dive into anything).
At least 3.3TB/week/user is little enough that Dropbox has now made themselves irrelevant to many/most datahoarders.
As an example, the LayerOnline account with ~100 users grew at a rate of ~800TB/day before it was shut down - 8TB/day/user. These guys mean business!
