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by javajosh 4886 days ago
A timely post. Dropbox loves to delete things, especially if you mess with 'selective sync'. For example, it deleted the git repository of my project a few weeks in. It deleted all of the files I had symlinked to in a subdirectory of my project. I was able to recover these files, but Dropbox is damn scary, since I don't know that actual circumstances in which these deletions occur. I suspect it has something to do with symlinks and selective sync, but I'm not entirely sure.

One thing that I might try is to have a very "Dropbox aware" process whereby you intentionally create empty delicate structures and then exclude them from sync. For example, do a `mkdir .git` before `git init`, exclude .git from DB, then do a quick `rmdir .git; git init` and pray to the God of data integrity. But I don't know if that will work.
2 comments
UnoriginalGuy 4886 days ago
This is something I constantly have to remind people with "sync" solutions (Dropbox, rsync, robocopy, etc). Anything that mirrors or syncs has the potential to delete the SOURCE material too. That is what it is designed to do.

The responses I seem to get are "NOT if you set it up correctly!!" which is obviously true, while also somehow managing to miss my point entirely.

If you want to just one way copy something then use a solution that is ONLY one way (copy, xcopy, S3 backups, CrashPlan, etc). If you want to mirror/sync then keep a nice backup for when that goes wrong.

PS - Also make sure you know the "rules" a sync solution runs using. For example how does it decide when a file is deleting? Is it just looking at directory update time and lack of files? What if files haven't been synced yet but the folder gets updated?

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res0nat0r 4886 days ago
Remember remember remember: Dropbox isn't a backup service! Make sure you keep proper backups for your important data.
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javajosh 4886 days ago
Dropbox disagrees with you: https://www.dropbox.com/tour/4

Note that I've been using DB successfully as an up-to-the-minute backup since it came out - it's only in the last week I've had problems bad enough to go back to my weekly backups.

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res0nat0r 4886 days ago
Four out of five doctors agree that X is great also. Does it matter what their marketing speak says?

Auto replication to the cloud isn't a proper backup plan, unless you are counting on noticing any missing data within their 30 day backup retention policy (if you are only using their free tier) and restoring your missing data before it is automatically purged.

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