HMURCHISON  I really don't get the issue with some of you. If you have an issue with the legalese of Dropbox and wish to hop on a soapbox and voice your opinion that's fine but it does not suffice for a review of the actual product. This is why Macupdate has a pull down menu that contains "comment" amongst the many choices. While your frustration may be palpable it's generally more constructive to comment rather than levy out some sort of punitive star rating as punishment for a rather subjective grievance.   
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SURFSPIRIT  Use Cryptography!  
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DOOBIEXX  HMURCHISON he is reviewing the product. When someone makes a review they do not just look at one aspect like UI for instance and judge the app on that, I personally want a review of every aspect of an application, i.e. Customer service, price, easy of use, etc. This was a review of the company, their legal agreement... are all important and this is a review of the company. I am glad that was posted, I for one am now going to download the app as I feel the same way. If he would have gone somewhere to "rant" I would be none the wiser to read through all the legalities of every single thing I put on my computer. It is a review, a review of the Company, UI and a couple other items when he references spideroak having a worse ui but better agreement that your data is safe. I do see where you are coming from, but lets have macupdate mods take care of those issues, if it was an issue.  
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JERRY KINDALL  Dropbox is not a backup service. If you want to use it for backups, there is a very simple workaround for the issue you raise: don't!

If you actually take a moment to look at the Dropbox site, nowhere does it mention backups. Instead it talks about synchronization and sharing. And lo, verily, the purpose of Dropbox is to synchronize files among multiple machines -- including one owned by the Dropbox operators, i.e., a Web site, from which they can (optionally) be accessed by others.

The verbiage you object is obviously intended to address abuse of the service (for example, using their Web servers to share a pirated movie with a few thousand of your closest friends). Your "invaluable data" would of course still be safely stored on the various computers that had been synchronized to your Dropbox account before you did whatever it was that caused them to kick you off.

Also, of course, they reserve the right to go out of business at any time, like any good Web 2.0 startup, so your access might go away even if you didn't do anything to raise their ire. I'm not sure what they could do about that -- promise that they'll never die? Obviously, the same thing could happen to Spiderpig or whatever. You still need actual backups, backups that you control. A "cloud" backup is not a backup, it's just called one.  
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HOBOJOE  Jerry,

Pretty funny crack with "Spiderpig." Being a Simpsons fan, that made me laugh :)

But you're wrong.

Go to Dropbox's site, and click on "Install" at the bottom of the home page. What features does Dropbox tout? I'll give you a hint. The second one is "Backup," right there between "Synchronization" and "Sharing." Hope you can find it!

And then there's the matter of Dropbox Pro (vs. Dropbox Basic... both are Dropbox, so please don't try to argue that they're different services). For $10 a month, they'll even sell you 50 GB of storage.

Look, if they said, "We'll terminate your contract if we find you're abusing our bandwidth," hopefully after a warning or something, we wouldn't be having this discussion. But "without cause" and "without warning"? That's not right.

Special thanks to DoobieXX for the hearty defense ;)  
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JERRY KINDALL  I installed it quite a long time ago, and haven't been to the install page recently, so I guess you're technically correct -- the best kind of correct!

It does look like they now have some backup-ish features, such as the ability to restore deleted files and to retrieve previous versions. I am pretty sure they didn't have these features when I first started using it, and it never occurred to me to look for them. Mea culpa.

I suppose it could make sense to use Dropbox as a third-tier backup service, supplementing your own local and off-site backups, but there are far better choices for that. Some of those services offer unlimited storage, too -- not that you'd want to restore your entire system from the Internet (it would take me nearly a week, and I have a 20 Mbps service), but it certainly beats Dropbox's maximum of 50 GB.

Really, the main feature Dropbox offers is synchronization, and it excels at that. I often use it to share files I'm working on between my desktop and my laptop. (I also have all my desktop wallpaper in it, and a bunch of e-books.) But if I was suddenly unable to access the service, I wouldn't lose anything, because there are no files that are stored just "in the cloud." All my Dropbox files are stored on three computers I use on a regular basis anyway.  
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SHOTGUNWEDDINGS  Personally the point raised is very valid.

I sure as hell wouldn't be too happy to find my account and data were terminated without any interaction after I just emailed my clients to review the drafts I uploaded for them to consider.

Thanks but no thanks DropBox  
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XENOPHILE  So what did you expect? A free service that backs up your data off-site, guarantees it's security, and promises to keep its servers on line forever?

They've got to have the legalese you complain about because if they didn't and had a server fail or went out of business or whatever, someone like you would try to sue them for losing the sole backup of your Important Data.   
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GANNET  My understanding is that updates are gradually pushed out to users over the course of a month or so after the update is released. I'm not sure why they do it this way but the self-update mechanism is all there.  
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FRODO_LIFE  agree auto update would be good  
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