The down-vote wasn't for posting about his friend's experience. The down-vote was about his friend and also for blaming Dropbox for something that was 100% his friend's responsibility.

Let's bring it down to a "skin in the game experience".

- Save-up $250K - Invest all of it in a startup - Hire a couple of programmers to help you out - None of you setup any local backups - You choose to rely on web service X for backups - You don't test anything 'cause everyone is doing it this way - You still don't have local backups - A year later something goes wrong and you loose all of your work - You just lost all of your time, money and the startup tanks - You go online and blame service X for your loss

Clearly service X had nothing to do with the series of decisions and actions that led to your loss. Your loss was due to "pilot error" and plain-old home-grown incompetence. Nothing more, nothing less. Blaming someone else might feel good, but the reality is that a less-than-professional treatment of the matter is what caused the loss. Service X was just along for the ride.

I quit blaming others a long, long time ago. In my experience you can do forensics in almost all of these situations and identify someone who was either dumb, lazy or incompetent who ended-up giving you the gift of irrecoverable data loss.

Like I said in my original post, I was EXTREMELY lucky to have learned this lesson while in college. I lost six months of work of a project for the Physics department to a drive failure. Horribly painful. Ugly. I am so thankful for having learned that lesson in that context. It would have sucked to have learned it outside of academia and while working on projects where data loss could have resulted in significant financial loss.

My sentiment stands: With local storage being so plentiful and inexpensive these days there is no excuse for not having multiple redundant backups of anything that is important. You can even have a policy of shipping physical redundant backups to another storage location to mitigate the possibility of your local backups being compromised by something like a building-wide fire.

In another post I treat the other fundamental issue of backups over connectivity such as DSL.