[supercoder]

I lost respect for LayerVault when their software that I paid what I thought was good money for totally corrupted the PSD of an entire project that had 2 months worth of work put into it.

I thought I had a backup on my laptop, desktop, remote backup from my desktop and all the revisions on their server. But all revisions were corrupted and it synced those bad copies to all my machines, including the machine that performed it's own remote backup (so all those backups were broken).

Their support team acknowledged that it was a problem and that they were 'hoping' to fix in an upcoming version, but offered absolutely no solution to fix my data except their apologies.

Never going to trust that product ever again if they don't have data integrity as their number 1 priority.

[kayoone]

This is bad but it also looks like you didnt have a proper backup strategy. Their service looks like a versioning/syncing service but not a backup service.

[supercoder]

Well that's the thing, I actually thought my backup strategy was decent enough. Multiple versioned copies in multiple places.

My desktop was being backed up nightly to a remote source. Though it was the laptop (which wasnt being backed up) which I was doing the work on / changes to. But I saw that layer vault was syncing the changes to the desktop so figured it was fine.

So it went Laptop -> Layer Vault -> Desktop -> Remote Backup. But of course everything that passed through Layer Vault got corrupted. And eventually it 'resynced' all that corruption back to the laptop and the file went completely dead. So there ended up being no good copies of it.

So yeah in hindsight can say it was my fault for not doing nightlys of the laptop. But at the time I thought my strategy was fine, trusting that while at worst I'd lose a few versions or something if something terrible happened, not for it to actively destroy the file.

[eksith]

One kind of anything is a single point of failure.

Well hindsight is always 20/20, but your backup strategy still relied on a single service (that wasn't your own). Backup is one thing no one should completely rely on a third-party. Whether it's a USB drive, good ol' DVDs or what have you, anything else "of your own" is crucial at least weekly if not end-of-day.

The effort going into your backups must match the value you place on your data.

[tripzilch]

no the problem here was not checking the integrity of your backups.

not a "one kind of anything" single pt of failure problem. he expected LayerVault to not corrupt the PSDs sent through them (and the syncing actions made it worse), which is not unreasonable. it's the same as trusting Photoshop to write PSD files to disk that are identical when opened later.

the difference is that Photoshop is more time-tested and well-known, which changes the odds, but in your argument still would make Photoshop's saving mechanism a single point of failure as well.

and then what, use more different graphic design tools? :)

in your example, if you burn your backups to a good ol' DVD, don't you check that the files are actually on there? and have the burning tool check the integrity? and finally, if you don't check a few of those PSDs to actually load in Photoshop, who knows that the data your DVD burning tool received was correct?

[eksith]

Oh, quit nitpicking! :P

You're right, backups are meaningless if they're unchecked. No different than dumping to a tape drive that's never verified and you get weeks of... nothing.

[kayoone]

yeah could have easily happened to myself, things like that happen. What i dont understand is why your Remote Backup Source has only one (the latest) version of the file ?

[supercoder]

Ah because the Remote Backups were being done of my Desktop (the changes were being done on my Laptop).

As the Desktop was getting the changes via the LayerVault syncs (simliar to say a Dropbox folder) each sync from LayerVault was sending a corrupted file.

So there were plenty of 'versions' of the file in remote backup, except these were all totally corrupted!

[lucisferre]

It's understandable to think that, but look at it this way: If Git did this sort of thing Hg would have won that battle hands down. I realize designers don't have any alternatives and this is one of the first solutions out there, but it is really important it be well built or at a minimum that they, LayerVault that is, provide a solid backup strategy to ensure they protect their users.

[kaoD]

Why didn't you sue them? That could've been profitable (they even acknowledged their responsibility) and apparently fair too.