Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't trust Dropbox as a journaled backup solution.

I powered up a virtual machine that had been down for a while and had dropbox installed. I tried to SSH in. My password kept being rejected. I verified my key through the console, and then it dawned on me that the VM's clock was off, and that's why SSL didn't work. So I set the clock. I think I set it a couple seconds into the future.

Fast forward a couple of days and I tried to open a project on another computer, but half the files were missing. What gives? I logged into the Dropbox web interface and saw that three days ago, "2311 files were deleted"!!! That's individual files from all over dropbox. How do I restore them??? Luckily I had a local hard drive backup and got most of my stuff, but it was hell to merge.

Did I screw up? Maybe, but I came to realize that that little blue box running in my task bar which has permission to delete my important files whenever it's algorithm thinks it needs to scares the hell out of me.

IIRC you can get deleted files from dropbox.com for 30 days for free accounts. With a paid account you can go back in history indefinitely.

Right, but in my case, it would have been one file at a time.

OK, I see now that free accounts require a support ticket to revert everything to a specific point in time. One of my users a year or two ago was able to restore a very big folder herself; she must have had a paid Dropbox account with the Pack Rat feature.

The problem is that it requires 2,311 clicks to restore those. There's no ability to batch restores, to my knowledge.

I had it happen to me, and an email to their support solved the problem. They gave me a few additional GB's for the inconvenience too.

I could be wrong, but a cursory glance at Dropbox's REST API at least provides some hope for those who've lost a large number of files in Dropbox.

(https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/api#restore)

True but (unless I've missed something) it's insanely tedious for more a few lost files.) There seems to be no way to first select all the files to restore and them have them restored in one action.

I've had similar lost files situations, such a setting up a new machine, where dropbox mistook an empty folder as the most current state and proceeded to delete things from other machines.

Whether or not this is what one should expect given the circumstances, or if these mishaps could be avoided with some care, it's still a little too easy to lose things. My fear is something will vanish and I won't realize it until it's too late to restore it.

The Dropbox Web site offers an RSS feed for your account activity. I've taken to watching this to see if there's any unexpected deletion going on. I've half a mind to write some cron thing that filters the feed for deletions and alerts me somehow.

Downside to this is that Dropbox has a way of updating files by deleting what's there and then adding back a newer version. Perhaps I just need an RSS feed of deletions that I scan periodically or check when I've done something potentially dangerous (like restore a drive or VM or something).

Makes me wonder if there's a business in here, helping people safeguard (select) Dropbox content.

If you'd have filed a ticket with Dropbox support, they'd have fixed that and restored all your files instantly, no hassle, no questions asked.

That's great, at least for massive, scorched-earth file loss.

With my most recent loss the were missing folders I wanted back, but other items I deleted earlier on purpose. Even in the mistakenly deleted folders were items I didn't want.

I'd be happy if there was a way on the Web site to either select "Restore entire folder" or check off files in a folder and opt to restore all selected.

But good to know about filing a ticket. Thanks.

My impression skimming through the help files on this is that you ask to have things restored to a particular event in your Dropbox event history. There would only be a problem if there were other items deleted later on purpose.

Not true -- you must purchase pack-rat unlimited history ($39) to be able to go back beyond 30 days. This is not included in the paid accounts.

Both paid and free accounts have 30 days of deleted file history by default.

To summarize all the replies to euroclydon...

Free and non-Pack-Rate paid accounts can have their files restored for up to 30 days into the past. A support ticket is required for batch restoration; otherwise you have to restore files one-by-one. (brlewis is wrong in thinking that non-Pack-Rate paid accounts have an indefinite history.)

Pack-Rat paid accounts can batch restore all files no matter how old and without a support ticket.

Thanks. I love Dropbox. What is the UI like for a batch restore? I can't find anything on it or it's features.

Dunno.

rsync to an external drive. I use droppy for Web access and convenience only.

Suggestion: rsync a folder tree over to the dropbox directory once a session? anacron every 30 mins?

It's better to use duplicity than rsync. It provides incremental backups so you can restore from points in time.

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Still in beta? I'll try it out on a test box later on when things are quieter.

I didn't realise that. Maybe they apply "beta" in the same way as Google. It has been around for years and is very stable from my experience. I wrote up how I use it to handle my backups last year: https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...

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