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Comment by JonChesterfield | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox synced with an empty folder, i.e. deleted everything. I didn't notice for over 30 days which was the cutoff for their historical files. Thus my easy off-site copy which I was previously very attached to effectively deleted everything. I did not go back.

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This is a classic lesson that everyone learns called Sync Is Not Backup. Everyone learns it eventually and then writes a blog post on it. It used to be a classic HN meme:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27157427

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008837

And every storage company tells a tale of backup vs sync:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-vs-cloud-sync/

Definitely, It's not a backup if it's not at least 3 backups in different places.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

Well, and that a sync can destroy existing files while a proper backup flow can't.

If you had 3 syncs in 3 different providers but deleting your local folder causes all 3 copies to be deleted, that's still no good. You need another place where files can only be added to and never (automatically) removed.

I wasn't referring to syncs at all, but actual point in time backups, so I agree.

There are syncs that can also be configured to not to delete. It's how syncs can do version control.

If you use an off the shell backup or NAS like a Synology or QNAP it will take care of all of that for you. You can plug in external drives to it for copies, an then also have the NAS ship off backup copies to multiple places.

Since the cloud is someone else's computer, it's good to have your own copy of it too on your own hardware.

Hope that helps.

Data is valuable, worth learning to protect :).

Yes, sorry :) Was just trying to clarify it because the GP was talking about sync vs backup. But yeah, multiple copies is a good idea!

Yours is an extremely important clarification too.

Syncs get even worse, because most promised unlimited backups of revisions (thereby implying restoration)... And now maye when "deleted" files take up too much room, they disappear.

There are file clouds out there that seem to be better for the natural kind of use, whether it's backblaze, tarsnap, sync.com, self-hosted options and others.

>This is a classic lesson that everyone learns called Sync Is Not Backup.

It's essentially the same story as RAID Is Not A Backup.

Like with sync you have redundancy, but Lord Redundancy never said he was also also Count Time.

Something similar happened to me once. I still don't know what exactly happened, but in Dropbox some files were deleted, I still had my local copy, but then Dropbox synced the file deletions and I didn't notice. Only when it was too late did I notice that files were gone and their support was unable to help. I think I managed to recover some files with one of the NTFS "undelete" tools, but that was probably the day I started to treat "the cloud" differently. Nowadays I don't even know what's still in my Dropbox ...

I was clearing out Dropbox when I moved away from it, and it _wouldn't_ let me delete my copy of `tex.web`, because it thought it was some sort of special dropbox file. (It was the source to TeX.)

That's too good. Did you have to rename the file to get Dropbox to delete it?

It's been a few years, but I think I managed to delete it in the web UI. (This was on macos, and they had a kernel extension keeping an eye on things by that point.)

I also had exactly the same experience. I ended up losing lots of documents.

Pfff... I think you can easily replicate that UX with an ftp server and CVS. :D

Reading about his experience, you can replicate the Dropbox behavior with an rm -rf :D ftp and CVS would be actually functional...

Hey now, no need to cast shade at rm -Rf. It's way more functional than Dropbox :)

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