Dropbox Kept Files Around For Years Due To 'Delete' Bug (bleepingcomputer.com)

Dropbox has fixed a bug that caused old, deleted data to reappear on the site. The bug was reported by multiple support threads in the last three weeks and merged into one issue here. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: In some of the complaints users reported seeing folders they deleted in 2009 reappear on their devices overnight. After seeing mysterious folders appear in their profile, some users thought they were hacked. Last week, a Dropbox employee provided an explanation to what happened, blaming the issue on an old bug that affected the metadata of soon-to-be-deleted folders. Instead of deleting the files, as users wanted and regardless of metadata issues, Dropbox choose to keep those files around for years, and eventually restored them due to a blunder. In its File retention Policy, Dropbox says it will keep files around a maximum 60 days after users deleted them.

Comments

Correct title

[Anonymous Coward]

Dropbox Kept Files Around For Years Due To Delete 'Bug'

FTFY

Re:Correct title

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if other cloud service providers have such 'bugs'.

Re:Correct title

[elrous0]

I wonder if other cloud service providers have such 'bugs'.

Only the ones on their knees sucking NSA and FBI dick. In other words, pretty much all of them.

But kudos to Dropbox for their incompetent slip that confirmed everything we'd feared about such file sharing services archiving and sharing data with the government.

I wonder if they're doing this for the Chinese government too. I suspect the answer is a resounding "yes."

Re:Correct title

[Immerman]

Was it 8 years worth of data, or just data from 8 years ago? Big difference, and the summary at least indicates the latter.

Re:Correct title

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Was it 8 years worth of data, or just data from 8 years ago? Big difference, and the summary at least indicates the latter.

I think it's awfully trusting of you to believe that they weren't saving everything deliberately.

It seems ridiculously unlikely that this sort of thing could go on for 8 years without anyone noticing. If nothing else, the need for constantly increasing storage should have made someone wonder what was going on.

But seriously, one of their key functions, namely "deleting a file" didn't work and no one noticed for almost a decade?

Yeah sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't notice terabytes of data just piling up over 8 years. Mkay.

FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of deleting the files, as users wanted and regardless of metadata issues, Dropbox choose to secretly keep those files around for years, but accidentally made this visible to the user when they restored them due to a blunder.

Alternative Facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how for exactly 8 years, this internet company managed to accidentally not delete documents that its users asked to be deleted in confidence, and a week after a new administration takes power, they magically find out that they weren't deleting any documents and now they have to be purged.

It's almost like someone wanted to keep these deleted documents around so they could comb through them to find patterns, or something. It's a good thing that our government isn't spying on us through our social media sharing sites, or something.

Re:Alternative Facts

[antdude]

I always assume the hosts have copies even if you nuke them. :(

Re:Tell me the OS

[93 Escort Wagon]

Which OS is it that is so complicated that when you ask it to delete a file, it doesn't? I wasn't aware that one even exists

I strongly suspect this has nothing to do with the OS and everything to do with Dropbox Inc.

I don't imagine they actually delete anything - they probably just set a "do not show to user" flag. It's probably still there, ad infinitum, along with any and all metadata connecting the file to you as an individual.

Re:Tell me the OS

[guruevi]

Pretty much any filesystem since before MSDOS only unlinks the file, not really deletes it. Windows 95 came with a Trash can feature that only moved files to the Trash until the user unlinked the files. These days cloud/flash based storage will do pretty much the same, keep the data around until it's either overwritten due to space congestion or deleted by an admin.

Re:Tell me the OS

[Dogtanian]

Which OS is it that is so complicated that when you ask it to delete a file, it doesn't? I wasn't aware that one even exists

As others pointed out, no, typical OSs don't overwrite it when you "delete" it.

In addition to this, however- I don't know what Dropbox's setup is, and I know sod all about enterprise storage et al. However, I feel pretty confident in assuming it's *not* going to be anything as simple as an "off the shelf" hard drive or even RAID setup using the standard Windows, Linux or whatever facilities and filesystems like one would find in a desktop PC!

The comparison is therefore pretty meaningless.

Re:Storage costs?

[guruevi]

Not necessarily, all of Dropbox is approx. 120-200PB. Distributed over thousands of storage servers it's really peanuts to save people's history (which are mostly small delta's). Running a storage system of 200TB myself, people tend not to delete stuff all that much and even so, the entire amount of people's previous storages is encapsulated every time we have to upgrade (every 3 years). 10 years ago we stored close to 10TB, now 10TB is a rounding error on the upgrade.

Wait till they hear about Alexa and Cortana and ..

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You think the "voice assistants" Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana etc who continually listen to the microphone do not save what they hear? You think the companies are not saving all that audio? Recently there was an article about ultra low bit rate audio codecs, tuned to human speech, that can record 80 years of audio in a 8 GB file.

Re:Tell me the OS

[The-Ixian]

Pretty much any filesystem since before MSDOS only unlinks the file, not really deletes it.

Yeah, nice try.

Except that if this was the case, you would almost certainly not be able to restore 8 year old files. How many times do you think they have updated their storage systems in the last 8 years? I am guessing the answer is more than 0.