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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

#121

Post by Spooky23 »

gabemart wrote: post #13

I think this bug should be considered completely separately from how unwise it is to use a cloud service as the sole storage of important files. Regardless of the circumstances, losing user files against the wishes of the user is the absolute worst thing a cloud backup provider can do . Even for files that are deleted intentionally and unambiguously by the user, I'm astonished that Dropbox actually deletes the files…

Key assumption to your argument: Dropbox is a backup service.

I don't think that they are. More like the modern incarnation of a file server. Like a fileserver, they have resiliency against service failure or individual storage system failure (via S3). Cool stuff, but it ain't backup.

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

#122

Post by pyre »

dublinben wrote: post #108
sudorank wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like keeping backups on a hard disk in the office. For a guy who grew up in the 90's there's something comforting about being able to physically look at one of your backup methods!

That's a great backup method, which is cheap and easy to recover. It's not very robust though. In the event of a natural disaster, your office is just as likely to be destroyed as your home. Ideally you would have an offsite backup (or two) in a completely different region.

The 'different region' requirement might just depend on different things:

- How far away are your office and home?

- What is your locality?

As an example, I don't live in a place prone to earthquakes or hurricanes, and my office is a 20 ~ 30 min drive from my home. What is the risk that both my office and home are destroyed?

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

#123

Post by Spooky23 »

_delirium wrote: post #54
jackweirdy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backups should be read only. If I can delete parts of a backup, it's just as susceptible to the same human mistakes that make them necessary in the first place.

By that definition, most corporate backup systems aren't backups! It's pretty common to overwrite old tape backups with newer backups, and yes, that does mean you need to be organized enough to make sure you don't accidentally overwrite the only backup of something.

Not at all. Any backup system defines an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective).

Usually, backups are scoped to protect against system failure, so fast time to recover and limited historical durations are usually design goals. Being able to restore a server to it's state 20 weeks ago isn't very useful.

Dropbox is like shadow copies in Windows. You can go back in time, for the purposes of journaling changes to an existing object. It's a productivity enhancer for users, not really a backup feature.

Keeping things forever is usually referred to as backup. For example, my employer keeps certain records for 100 years due to statutory requirements. When you archive, you want to tightly scope what you archive and limit it as much as possible. Things like short time to restore are usually not primary design goals.

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

#124

Post by kngspook »

steven2012 wrote: post #91
DanBC wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did that work? Would it have been more effective to just provide him with a list of stuff - a choice of two drives; a choice of two softwares (with really easy URLs to buy and download) and instructions for using and testing. That could be a gift for birthday or Xmas?

I bought him a new hard drive, copied the photos over and gave him instructions on how to do it. He hasn't bothered to update his backup once, and it's been about 5 years and his photo collection has only grown.

I'm thinking of buying a CrashPlan Business account (my corp uses the Enterprise version) for my family for this reason. I set them up with TimeMachine, but even plugging in a USB drive has proven to be too much to remember.

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

#125

Post by kngspook »

danbee wrote: post #116

The moment you only have one copy of your files anywhere you don't have a backup. I've heard it said that if a file doesn't exist in at least three different places it might as well not exist.

Exactly. (I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find this.)

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

#126

Post by dublinben »

pyre wrote: post #122
dublinben wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great backup method, which is cheap and easy to recover. It's not very robust though. In the event of a natural disaster, your office is just as likely to be destroyed as your home. Ideally you would have an offsite backup (or two) in a completely different region.

The 'different region' requirement might just depend on different things: - How far away are your office and home? - What is your locality? As an example, I don't live in a place prone to earthquakes or hurricanes, and my office is a 20 ~ 30 min drive from my home. What is the risk that both my office and home are destroyed?

If Toronto is hit by a devastating flood or winter storm, I think it's entirely likely that both your office and home could be impacted. That isn't nearly enough geographic separation to be disaster-ready. You really want to be on different coasts or continents.

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

#127

Post by vondur »

I worry about stuff like that happening to me with my photos. The best idea I've come up with is setting up a Synology that I export my photos to. It has a basic web app for showing off photos. I then use it's AWS S3 service to back those photos up every night. The Synology also has something like RAID1 on it for some redundancy at the local level. The hard part is remembering to export the files from the computer to the Synology.

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

#128

Post by judk »

gabemart wrote: post #38
egypturnash wrote: post #19

Sync is not backup. Sync is not backup. Sync is not backup. My strategy: a big external drive used for Time Machine, and a subscription to Backblaze. Both of these are all about retaining multiple versions, recovering from accidental deletion, and continuously backing up in the background. Dropbox is about syncing stuff between computers.

Dropbox keeps deleted files and previous versions of files for 30 days. With Packrat, a free feature for all paid accounts, Dropbox keeps deleted files for the lifetime of the account. How is Dropbox not a backup provider? It may not be a very good backup provider, depending on your point of view, but it clearly markets itself as a backup provider ("your stuff is always safe in Dropbox and can be restored in a snap")…

But the OP claimed that they are a paid user but don't have PackRat

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

#129

Post by kngspook »

pyre wrote: post #122
dublinben wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great backup method, which is cheap and easy to recover. It's not very robust though. In the event of a natural disaster, your office is just as likely to be destroyed as your home. Ideally you would have an offsite backup (or two) in a completely different region.

The 'different region' requirement might just depend on different things: - How far away are your office and home? - What is your locality? As an example, I don't live in a place prone to earthquakes or hurricanes, and my office is a 20 ~ 30 min drive from my home. What is the risk that both my office and home are destroyed?

It's all just a matter of risk management:

- Simply copying your data to a second hard drive in the same machine protects against hard drive failure.

- Second disconnected hard drive protects you from ransom-viruses and accidental erasures.

- Second disconnected hard drive on the other side of the house gives you some protection from a fire (caught early enough).

- Second disconnected hard drive in another building some distance away protects against small disasters (eg. randomly directed tornado).

- Second disconnected hard drive in another region protects against large disasters (eg. single nuclear strike).

- Second disconnected hard drive in another country protects against national disasters (eg. invasion, multiple nuclear strikes).

- Second disconnected hard drive on another continent protects against major disasters (eg. moderate asteroid impact event)

...and so on. But all of these can be protected against by simply having 3 backups.

Except bit rot. That shit's inevitable.

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