Dropbox Support is terrible

Two-step Authorization hell and why I’m going to be less secure because Support failed to provide help when it was needed.

I’ve been a happy Dropbox customer for years

I’d like to preface this all with the fact that I’ve been a happy Dropbox customer for years. Dropbox provides a great service, which makes this entire experience over the last week such a shame and so frustrating.

How did this happen?

It all started a week ago when I installed the Yosemite update on my mac. My original installation had become full of cruft and I thought that it was time for a fresh, clean install of OS X. I thought that the new update would be a great opportunity to clean house.

I backed up everything externally and to dropbox, saved my passwords, double-checked my install media and rebooted. The install procedure went off without a hitch and within two hours I was back up and running — or so I thought.

Being Security Conscious

Recently, Dropbox had many of their user’s accounts compromised. It is thought that it was a dictionary-style attack and that weak passwords were at fault. My password sets are all three random words concatenated into one long password, generally 20+ characters in length.

That being said, my entire business is digitally based.

If anything were to happen to my working directory, I’d be in a lot of trouble. I keep two local backups and one remote, using Dropbox. I also use Dropbox to share files and sync with my clients. It’s a critical tool in my toolchain which will be hard to replace because of its ubiquity. It seems that everyone has a dropbox account these days.

Because of the security breach, I decided that it was time to enable two-step authorization on my account. I’ve been using it for years on my Google accounts and have had zero issues.

Setting up two-step auth on Dropbox

Getting set up for two-step authorization on Dropbox is fairly straightforward. I enabled the necessary options and received my confirmation text. I wrote down the emergency codes. I thought everything would be fine.

Let the hell begin

So, post-install, I try to install Dropbox. I get to the initial six-digit code screen and… nothing. It says that it has sent a code to my phone, but no code arrives. I re-send the code. Nothing.

The real trouble begins when I can’t find the emergency codes. Poof, they have just disappeared.

No six-digit code. No emergency code. I’m officially in trouble.

I sent an email to Dropbox support and am told that a response can take between 1 and 3 business days. Not really the type of support that a paying customer expects, but it is understandable. What is particularly frustrating is that I can’t post to the forums because you need to be signed in to your dropbox account to do so. I post to twitter @Dropbox_support and receive an answer telling to contact contact support via email. Hmm.

It also seems as though I’m not the only user who is locked out of his account because of this issue.

After four days, I receive my first email response — a canned email. It tells me that if my computer is still linked, then I can disable two-step auth by logging in and turning it off. If its logged in to my phone, I can do the same there. My initial email explicitly stated that my machine had been wiped clean. I answered saying that my smartphone was never connected to dropbox via an app and that this was not an option for me.

Dropbox replied the next day telling me that yes indeed my computer was still connected to Dropbox. They also helpfully told me that if I still had access to my phone I could send the codes necessary to logging in there. I had, of course, already explained that I was not receiving the 6-digit codes to my phone.

Dropbox support then replied letting me know that if I supplied them with the phone numbers, they would send the six digit code to me phone. Which I had, again, already told them was not working. Sending texts to my phone was not an option.

I asked them to send the code via email or to turn off two-step auth. I was expecting at this point for them to try and verify my identity. Instead I received this infuriating response.

This is after five emails where I had stated that I was not receiving text messages to my phone.

Random Salvation

As I began writing this ordeal out to share with the community in the hopes that someone at Dropbox would see this and help me fix it, their system came back online and I started to receive the 6-digit pin number required to sign in to two-step auth. I don’t know what was different, whether there was a problem with my cell provider or if there was a bug within Dropbox’s system.

Screw it.

Frankly, I don’t really care why things didn’t work. The incredibly poor experience that I’ve had with Dropbox Support has turned a loyal and happy customer into someone who is going to shop around and find another provider for cloud file hosting.

My basic expectations as a consumer of a digital product are:

If I’m paying $99 a year for a product, I expect to have support contact me within 24 hours when catastrophe occurs. Four days is ridiculous. I expect Support to actually read my responses and understand my problem. Seriously. This is a no-brainer.

Dropbox is currently getting squeezed by Google and other large players like Apple. They should realize that there are customers like me who depend on their products and are willing to pay a premium for reliability and good support. Don’t make us go elsewhere if we are happy.

In the meantime

I’ve turned off two-step auth and will have to hope nothing bad happens. I’m looking at Spideroak and google drive as alternatives to Dropbox.