I think this bug should be considered completely separately from how unwise it is to use a cloud service as the sole storage of important files.<p>Regardless of the circumstances, losing user files against the wishes of the user is <i>the absolute worst thing a cloud backup provider can do</i>.<p>Even for files that are deleted intentionally and unambiguously by the user, I'm astonished that Dropbox actually deletes the files at the end of the 30-day restore window. I would expect them to keep the files for some multiple of the publicly-stated restore deadline where the multiple >= 2, if for no other reason than as a goodwill generator. There is no more evangelical advocate for your company than the customer you email to say "Yes, you intentionally deleted this file six weeks ago. The 30 day deletion deadline has passed, but I have managed to restore the most recent version of your dissertation. Thank you for using Dropbox."<p>For files that aren't intentionally deleted by the user but are "de-synced", it is disgraceful and appalling that there is no contingency system in place. Keeping user files when the user assumes or wishes them to be kept safe is the core competency of a service like Dropbox.<p>"The user should have kept multiple redundant copies" is <i>not an excuse</i> for a poorly managed online backup service. "Keep multiple backups of everything important" is good advice for a <i>user</i>, but "Keep user files safe when the user thinks they are safe" is the most essential advice imaginable for the CEO of an online backup service.
Sync is not backup.<p>Sync is not backup.<p>Sync is not backup.<p>My strategy: a big external drive used for Time Machine, and a subscription to Backblaze. Both of these are all about retaining multiple versions, recovering from accidental deletion, and continuously backing up in the background. Dropbox is about syncing stuff between computers.
I noticed there hasn't been any mention of attempting to recover your deleted files from your local disk. If you haven't tried it yet it is worth a shot. There are a few software solutions out there that will scan your disk for files that have been deleted. On Windows I have used Piriform's Recuva[1] and on OS X I have used PhotoRec[2], both have worked rather well. It is worth noting that the longer you wait to try the more likely the sectors are to be overwritten with new data. (And you should back up any files currently on the disk). I know it is a long shot at this point but some chance is better than none. Good luck.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.piriform.com/recuva" rel="nofollow">http://www.piriform.com/recuva</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec" rel="nofollow">http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec</a>
The bug in question:<p>> From all this information it seems that Dropbox client first deletes files locally before it informs the server about the new selective sync settings. Consequently, if the client crashes or is killed before the server is contacted, the files remain deleted without any trace. After the client restarts again, it only sees there are some files missing and syncs this new state with the server.<p>It concerns me that the top several comments are some variation of "you shouldn't trust the cloud with your data." How did software services become so totally insulated from the expectations we have of every other service that holds on to our valuable property?
I don't trust anything called "sync".<p>I trust file operations "move", "copy" and "remove".<p>But "sync" could mean anything: which side is syncing to which side? If something is not present on one side, will it delete it on the other?<p>I wish the term didn't exist, and apps/clients/... would copy or even just load or show things, and if you want to "sync", then rsync with clear source and destination. Same with mail for example: I don't want to "sync" email messages, I just want to see them, the most recent ones first.
In today's digital age, I believe lots and lots of people will lose a lot of valuable information like photos because they don't have a good understanding of what backing up means.<p>I've warned my friend who is computer illiterate that he is risking losing his childrens' complete photo collection for their entire lives because he is only keeping a single copy of his data on his hard drive. This is probably the situation with millions of people in the US alone, and when that hard drive failure event happens, which will happen, then they will lose everything.
I use Dropbox for sharing pictures, but would never even dream to use a cloud based service for backup purposes.<p>Granted, Jan's case is a bit more complex and I'm really sorry for his loss.<p>Stories like that should really be a lesson to everybody never to completely trust a cloud based service as your main backup.<p>On a side note: I agree that archiving of digital files is a hard problem. The smartest librarians of the world are thinking about how to achieve this for, literally, decades and I'm not sure they even have a good solution to the problem.<p>My personal strategy is redundancy: I buy new hard disks every couple of years and copy all important files, twice. One hard disk is kept off site.<p>It's not perfect, but it's the best I can come up with. Reading horror stories, like Jan's, indicates that it's the better solution. Despite the messiness.
When your main business is storing files (and you also just raised yet another shitload of cash), not offering better safeguards against file loss is inadmissible. I left Dropbox for Google Drive when they announced the Condolezza Rice move, and I haven't looked back since.
<i>If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again.</i><p>Simplify to <i>If you only have a sole backup, think again.</i> Points 4 and 5 should be you always have more than one backup of important material and at least one backup should be on physical media that you own.
This happened to me (in German): <a href="http://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2012/04/18/fur-immer-ausgesperrt-bei-google-eine-leidensgeschichte/" rel="nofollow">http://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2012/04/18/fur-immer-ausges...</a>
This is clearly a problem for the reputation of dropbox.<p>On their website they market the service as:<p>"Even if your phone goes for a swim, your stuff is always safe in Dropbox and can be restored in a snap."<p>With this message in mind, and a valuation of roughly >>10$ BILLION<<.<p>I think, you can have very very high expectations regarding the data retention of their service.<p>Also, the whole point of using a service like dropbox is to remove friction/time investment regarding the standard backup/sync tasks.<p>If you suggests to handle multiple harddisk backups locally+offsite, that is fine except that not everyone wants this kind of time investment and cost associated with a do-it-yourself backup service and rather depend on a service provider that they can trust.
As I said to someone the other day after dealing with yet another failure by Dropbox to do the safe thing or even the reasonably-recoverable thing with our data: "One reason I'm not worth a billion dollars is I would never have let Dropbox ship like this!"<p>Doing sync on top of an existing filesystem, making it work with existing apps, maintaining solid transaction semantics, and having a simple, understandable user model -- you just can't do all four. The Dropbox experiment has now shown that "correctness" doesn't matter, commercially speaking.
We live in a convenient age, but also a fickle one. I laugh when my wife prints 100 hundreds of digital photos although her disaster recovery process is more stable than mine.
Dropbox has <i>one of the worst websites on the Internet</i>. Seriously!<p>E.g. people have mentioned that "packrat" would have helped in this situation. But try finding that service from the pricing page. Hint: NOT THERE. Someone here linked to some explanation in their "help" section. Seriously? Such an important feature is only mentioned under "help"?<p>Even if you go to sign up for the paid version, Dropbox Pro, packrat isn't mentioned [1]. Their horrid website alone is enough for me to not want to do business with them.<p>Someone else here has succinctly summarized the situation [2]:<p><pre><code> One reason I'm not worth a billion dollars
is I would never have let Dropbox ship like this!
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade</a>
[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105548" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105548</a>
As many others mentioned already "sync is not backup".
If you really want true backup then on a Mac I will suggest to have a setup like:
1- local backup for quick recovery with Time Machine
2- remote backup with a true backup solution like CrashPlan (or similar)<p>I personally have such setup with a local one with my Time Machine, and having CrashPlan running all the time, it did save me a couple times when after many weeks I deleted a wrong file or folder... Got everything back without problem.<p>If you don't have a Time Capsule, then you can always consider an alternative with just a smaller subset of what you want to archive by using a JetDrive by Transcend.
I recently got a 128GB JetDrive and it is my local destination for my MBP for TimeMachine... Yes 128GB is not enough but knowing that CrashPlan is constantly running make me comfortable enough with that setup.
> "you should backup"<p>What about in 10, 20 years? Photo libraries will keep inflating. Local storage will not. As of now I backup from a SSD Mac. What happens when I don't have a computer anymore?<p>Interestingly, people don't value "bits" or information. We value moments and emotions and work and art. There's no successful current consumer business model for people to store and backup photos (Backblaze is mainly prosumer).<p>And so aren't social networks the real backups by now? The redundancy of publishing on multiple services means some photos will stick and the rest will fade, somehow like former printed pictures I guess. Publish it or lose it?
I had an issue similar to this (but fortunately not nearly as bad) about two and a half or three years ago and that was what convinced me to pay of the Packrat service add-on.<p>I agree with the OP that that should be a built-in option for all paying customers -- or at least make it more visible as an add-on. I've had instances in the past where it was months later that I realized something was either deleted or didn't sync and I had to look through Events and use Packrat to restore. It can be scary - even if you do make backups of your backups.
Once you deleted your own local copy, the folder of photos on Dropbox was no longer a "backup." You just moved your one copy elsewhere. You essentially had NO backup. And everyone should know, you should always have at least two backups. (Again, you had zero.) I wouldn't even consider Dropbox (without Packrat) a valid backup destination either, because any changes get synced.<p>Sorry this happened to you, but better backup practices could have avoided it easily.
My buddy Tom says "If its not on your current computer, its lost". Imagine when Dropbox closes one day (as every company ultimately does), how much will be lost.
It really sucks that we all have to keep learning this lesson over and over. Everyone I've ever spoken to that has a good backup strategy in place has it because they have lost irreplaceable files.<p>Have real backups. Syncing is not a backup strategy, raid is not a backup strategy, etc. 3-2-1 At least three copies in 2 different (storage) formats and at least one copy offsite. It sounds like overkill but you have to decide how much your data is really worth.
I worry about stuff like that happening to me with my photos. The best idea I've come up with is setting up a Synology that I export my photos to. It has a basic web app for showing off photos. I then use it's AWS S3 service to back those photos up every night. The Synology also has something like RAID1 on it for some redundancy at the local level. The hard part is remembering to export the files from the computer to the Synology.
I think the lesson here is not that the cloud is bad, it's that a sync service is not a backup. I use Dropbox to share, I use Amazon S3 to backup.
I use both backblaze, as well as Google Drive. I don't have anything in particular I'd be completely upset if I lost it forever, which is why I dont do local backups, but I've definitely been looking at using Crashplan as a secondary backup. I just cant be bothered to hook my laptop up to an external when I hardly sit next to it anyway.<p>What does HN think? Safe if I went with 2 cloud backup providers?
The solution to this kind of problems is: Make Read-only "disaster recovery" backups - zip it and burn it to a DVD set or Bluray, and put it off-site. Make incrementals or differentials of those discs every few months and a full data set each 3 months.<p>Takes a few hours, I like to burn all my data to Bluray (50GB per disk) while watching a movie.<p>Store the bluray data sets at a friend's house and never worry again.
Dropbox is NOT a backup service. It's a convenient file syncing and sharing service. And even then it's a good ides to actually check docs or help before proceeding to do something which might result In a loss of data.
Just curious why more people don't learn about and invest in home NAS's? Something like Synology would be pretty good at storing 8000 important photos. It is still a single point of failure, but its one I control.
> If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again.<p>Good advice.<p>> Without making a mistake, you might lose your files.<p>If Dropbox, or any other single service or method, constitutes your entire backup strategy, then the mistake is already made.
I would never consider using Dropbox (or any other cloud storage) as my sole backup system for critical files unless I was willing to pay for the "Packrat", i.e. infinite history, feature.
The moment you only have one copy of your files <i>anywhere</i> you don't have a backup.<p>I've heard it said that if a file doesn't exist in at least three different places it might as well not exist.
Try going into the folders and manually restoring. You can select more than one file at a time.... I was able to restore for more than 30 days... Worth a shot.