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0 pointsDylan1680713y ago0 comments

A full backup of about 600GB happens in --I think-- about three or four hours. That's the problem with remote backup, the same full image would require a third of a year on a typical DSL connection available in the US today. Actually, it could take twice as long, two thirds of a year, because you would have to interrupt your backup in order to get your bandwidth back for use during business hours. So, if it takes you nearly a whole year to backup this much data the whole thing is just-about useless as implemented. Your incremental backups are likely to take days and you can't even consider the idea of doing full images every thirty or sixty days.

The thing is, you don't need independent full backups within a single online backup provider, and they would probably deduplicate your backups anyway. Incremental backups work just fine, and will always get your data backed up that night unless you are the kind of person that generates many gigabytes of content in a single day.

I use Dropbox for team communications. I almost think of it as a really neat way to "FTP" stuff around.

Yeah, I can understand that. I was considering replying to one of your other posts with the comparison, but I didn't want to start too many thread at once. The problem is that when you use dropbox as a better FTP, you lose out on a lot of the benefits of syncing. No longer can you go to a different computer and pick up right where you were, if you didn't happen to copy in the files again since the last change. If you're sharing files with a coworker you no longer have any idea where the most recent version is. You don't have a full list of file versions. And your FTP-method of dropbox doesn't really have anything to do with backups. You could move files into the dropbox folder and then set it to be backed up every five minutes if you wanted to.

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robomartin13y ago

Obviously there are a number of use patterns for Dropbox. I just don't use it as a "live" store. The whole concept scares me. As far as moving to another computer and having access to the latest files, I can always VNC into a machine or VPN into the network if I am outside.

I just couldn't bring myself to using it that way. Our files are our work product. There is no way I could consider having the only copies of the files connected to a service that could cause total loss of data. It is, in my world at least, an absolute non-starter.

With regards to the idea of sharing files with a coworker and not knowing where the latest files are, well, that's what Git is for, isn't it?

As a matter of principle I have a bad reaction to the idea of calling a data loss event "Another Dropbox horror story". And this has nothing to do with Dropbox or any other service. Dropbox is not responsible for your data. You are. If the data is important enough that total loss would be catastrophic, what are you doing placing all the eggs in one basket? It isn't a Dropbox horror story, it's a story about someone who didn't care enough about their data to safeguard it and then the blame is shifted towards whoever last held the data. That just ain't cool. I own my fuck-ups. It isn't fun, but I stopped blaming others for my crap a long time ago. In the end it works out better that way.

Does Dropbox have issues to fix? Sure. What piece of software doesn't. Knowing that software is imperfect is more of a reason to not, again, place your valuable eggs in one basket.

I have a feeling that there are a lot of young and inexperienced people surfing HN who have never lost anything of significance. They come across someone like me who calls bullshit when he sees it and is willing to stand for what is a solid position and they don't understand it. The only tool they have to express themselves is to mindlessly down-vote cargo-cult style. That's fine, with that approach they'll learn soon enough.

I don't know of anyone --not ONE person-- with say, twenty or thirty years of successful work in computing who would trust the only copy of their projects to any one service --no matter what they claim or how good they might be. Hell, most of these people, just like me, would not trust the only copy of their projects to any single device, local or not. Shit happens. And some of us have seen it happen and have had to clean-up the mess on more than one occasion. Eventually you learn.

I do love Dropbox, but they are not going to come and redo two years worth of work if something goes wrong. And that can happen. And, if that were to happen, I would not blame them. I'd blame myself for being a moron and not having my own backups. Maybe I'll figure out a way to use their active sync technology while still satisfying the requirement for solid redundant backups. Until then, I have enough problems with other stuff to have to worry about having only one copy of our projects stored anywhere, local or not.

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