Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sdizdar 4978 days ago
Yes - sync is not a backup but services as Dropbox are designed to be backup too (with their revision feature).

So I think the underlaying problem here is that any backup/syncing system might have a bug (like this one) or there might be operator or user error (deleting your revision history is just a couple clicks away). Recovery oriented computing website has a lot good papers on this topic [1].

This is very similar to problems with outages on Amazon EC2 - yes Amazon cloud is great but in order to make your service highly available you do need to have standby system on some other cloud (for example, we run on Rackspace but our standbys are on Amazon).

One approach to protect yourself against problems like this is to replicate/sync all your files from one cloud storage (your primary one) to some other cloud service (GDrive, SugarSync, Box, etc.). So should Dropbox have a bug, then you still have everything in other cloud service: including all revisions.

Services like cloudHQ [2] (that is my baby) can replicate and sync all your files from Dropbox to, for example, GDrive. And of course cloudHQ has options like "two-way" sync, "don't replicate deletion", "backup" (weekly incremental are in folders - so your will be fine even if "revisions" feature fails), etc.

[1] http://roc.cs.berkeley.edu/

[2] http://cloudHQ.net