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How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos

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Re: How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos

#2
When your main business is storing files (and you also just raised yet another shitload of cash), not offering better safeguards against file loss is inadmissible. I left Dropbox for Google Drive when they announced the Condolezza Rice move, and I haven't looked back since.

Re: How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos

#4
I use Dropbox for sharing pictures, but would never even dream to use a cloud based service for backup purposes.

Granted, Jan's case is a bit more complex and I'm really sorry for his loss.

Stories like that should really be a lesson to everybody never to completely trust a cloud based service as your main backup.

On a side note: I agree that archiving of digital files is a hard problem. The smartest librarians of the world are thinking about how to achieve this for, literally, decades and I'm not sure they even have a good solution to the problem.

My personal strategy is redundancy: I buy new hard disks every couple of years and copy all important files, twice. One hard disk is kept off site.

It's not perfect, but it's the best I can come up with. Reading horror stories, like Jan's, indicates that it's the better solution. Despite the messiness.

Re: How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos

#6
If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again.

Simplify to If you only have a sole backup, think again. Points 4 and 5 should be you always have more than one backup of important material and at least one backup should be on physical media that you own.

Re: How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos

#7
> If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again.

Good advice.

> Without making a mistake, you might lose your files.

If Dropbox, or any other single service or method, constitutes your entire backup strategy, then the mistake is already made.

Re: How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos

#8
post #3

Try going into the folders and manually restoring. You can select more than one file at a time.... I was able to restore for more than 30 days... Worth a shot.

Many thanks for your advice, this was the first thing I tried, unfortunately without any success...

Re: How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos

#9

If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again. Simplify to If you only have a sole backup, think again. Points 4 and 5 should be you always have more than one backup of important material and at least one backup should be on physical media that you own.

>> If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again.

> Simplify to If you only have a sole backup, think again.

Yep. 3-2-1: "At least three copies, in two different formats, with one of those copies off-site."

Re: How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos

#10

I use Dropbox for sharing pictures, but would never even dream to use a cloud based service for backup purposes. Granted, Jan's case is a bit more complex and I'm really sorry for his loss. Stories like that should really be a lesson to everybody never to completely trust a cloud based service as your main backup. On a side note: I agree that archiving of digital files is a hard problem. The smartest librarians of th…

I've bought myself a Blue Ray recorder half a year ago and it's as easy to use as Dropbox with OS X...
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