
How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos - jancurn
https://medium.com/@jan.curn/how-bug-in-dropbox-permanently-deleted-my-8000-photos-cb7dcf13647b
======
gabemart
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.

Regardless of the circumstances, losing user files against the wishes of the
user is _the absolute worst thing a cloud backup provider can do_.

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."

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.

"The user should have kept multiple redundant copies" is _not an excuse_ for a
poorly managed online backup service. "Keep multiple backups of everything
important" is good advice for a _user_ , 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.

~~~
dspillett
_> 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._

YES: from DropBox's point of view - this is a serious bug even ignoring what
other actions the users have/not taken to protect their data.

And NO: this sort of thing is one of the key reasons _not_ to use such a
service as a sole backup - linking the two when trying to educate users on the
importance of thinking about data safety, so we can't separate the two as one
is important when hammering the other point home...

 _> 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_

That would cause significant consternation in some areas. If I explicitly
delete a file I might explicitly want it gone within the stated window and no
later and would therefore be unhappy if I found the data still available (even
if I had properly encrypted it before it touched the cloud service so noone
else could read it).

 _> For files that aren't intentionally deleted by the user but are "de-
synced",_

I definitely agree there - it sounds like that process needs some
transactional workflow wrapped around it so that:

1\. Client and server don't do _anything_ until they've both agreed what to do
(then they can both go away and do it even if the connection drops, safe in
the knowledge that the action is correct).

2\. The client and server record what has been agreed as part of that
transaction protected process, so in the case of an unclean stop during the
process it can be resumed/retried.

3\. Some process may need to be in place for one side rolling back if the
other detects a failure applying the agreed actions.

Of course this is a fair bit of work for something that won't happen often,
particularly when you consider that there might be more than one active
connection to a set of files at any given time so it might not be a simple
two-way merge operation, so DB may have other priorities - but the bad PR from
it happening and not being cleanly dealt with is something that they need to
consider if making that sort of decision.

 _> "The user should have kept multiple redundant copies" is not an excuse for
a poorly managed online backup service_

Agreed. But "the single backup service failed" is similarly not something that
is going to encourage me to have sympathy for the user!

Sync services are excellent secondary backups, and they satisfy the "off site"
requirement that a great many home and small-office users neglect (I know
people who worked for a small company which died because the backups were in
the same building as the active data so one fire took out the lot), but no one
should trust them as their _only_ backup. I even recommend against multiple
sync services as your only backups as that in itself can cause problems (when
bugs or other peculiarities from one interact badly with similar behaviours in
another).

Using just a sync service means you have no off-line (or even semi-offline)
backup, which is as bad as not having any off-site copies.

Of course getting this involves educating users as to the risks they are
taking, which is a point _notoriously_ difficult to get across, so while I
don't expect a service like DB to be perfectly bug free (and therefore
wouldn't trust it as an only backup) I think such services need to help the
education process by being a little less indigenous about the safety issue and
making sure their users know that an accidental delete will be propagated
everywhere and be unrecoverable after a time. This will never happen though:
"please use some other backup option too in case ours goes wrong" is not a
sentiment marketing departments or investors will want to see publicly stated!

~~~
Silhouette
_Of course this is a fair bit of work for something that won 't happen often_

If you think about it, that sums up almost any robust back-up system you go to
the effort of setting up, properly testing, and maintaining over time. For
that matter, it applies to almost any insurance policy in any context.

I expect most of us would still agree that potential catastrophic damage if
you're the unlucky one can justify spending the time/money/resources to set up
proper back-ups and insurance, though, and surely this is the case if you're
running a service where robust file handling is your major value proposition.

~~~
dspillett
_> If you think about it, that sums up almost any robust back-up system you go
to the effort of setting up_

Exactly, which is why people should think harder than they do about backups.
_You_ should make sure that you are not exposed to risk you don't want to be
exposed to because someone else's development priorities differ from your
point of view.

True data protection is unfortunately a complicated business and most people
see the flashy presentations on services' sites and trust all is well without
giving it a second thought.

While I agree it should be the service's responsibility to cover these
eventualities, it is not good practise to assume that they do. You might
misunderstand what they do and not see risk were it is present, they might
have honest coding mistakes that cause problems down the line, there could be
ineptitude anywhere down the line, and so forth. If you are paying for their
service then you _might_ legitimately expect to be covered by some for of
insurance for loss in the event of it being caused by a problem in the
code/infrastructure, but never assume that until being explicitly told it is
present and you have read the small print, and don't ever assume this at all
for a free/cheap service.

------
egypturnash
Sync is not backup.

Sync is not backup.

Sync is not backup.

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.

~~~
gabemart
Dropbox keeps deleted files and previous versions of files for 30 days. With
Packrat, a free feature for all paid accounts, Dropbox keeps deleted files for
the lifetime of the account.

How is Dropbox not a backup provider? It may not be a very good backup
provider, depending on your point of view, but it clearly markets itself as a
backup provider ("your stuff is always safe in Dropbox and can be restored in
a snap"), is used by its users as a backup provider, and has the features of a
backup provider.

~~~
jackweirdy
Backups should be read only.

If I can delete parts of a backup, it's just as susceptible to the same human
mistakes that make them necessary in the first place.

~~~
_delirium
By that definition, most corporate backup systems aren't backups! It's pretty
common to overwrite old tape backups with newer backups, and yes, that does
mean you need to be organized enough to make sure you don't accidentally
overwrite the only backup of something.

~~~
snowwrestler
Maybe a better way to put it is that backups are isolated from current
"production" data operations.

Backups are not invulnerable, so yes, it's still possible to overwrite the
backups, but that involves engaging the backup system specifically. Just doing
file operations or settings changes on the production system won't do it.

Dropbox is not isolated from production data operations. In fact the whole
point is to synchronize production data operations as fast as possible. That
makes it dangerous.

(This does not excuse the bug is this story; sync setting changes should be
obviously be atomic transactions that are confirmed on the server.)

~~~
jackweirdy
Yeah; that's a better way of putting it. rm -rf'ing my production box's hard
drive shouldn't nuke the backups.

------
zperrault
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.

[1] [http://www.piriform.com/recuva](http://www.piriform.com/recuva) [2]
[http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec](http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec)

~~~
dpcan
Or, I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow he posts that he found them all in his
trash.... Because nobody ever thinks to clear it. Sometimes the simplest
solution is right under our nose.

~~~
pyre
He said that he de-synced them to free up space. I'm assuming that he would
have noticed if the operation _didn 't_ free up space.

------
rayiner
The bug in question:

> 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.

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?

~~~
kalleboo
> It concerns me that the top several comments are some variation of "you
> shouldn't trust the cloud with your data."

No, it's "you shouldn't trust one single thing with your data". Hardware
fails. OSes have bugs (OS X's "space in your drive name and we delete your
user folder.") Services have unexpected gotchas. This is why you never store
anything in only one place.

A sync service by definition is not a separate place (unless he had found a
bug in the Packrat feature)

~~~
rayiner
My point is that, for some reason, we have been conditioned to believe that
bugs and data loss are just something that happen as opposed to something that
service providers, who we pay money to, are charged with avoiding. We hold
software to a much lower standard of quality than we hold other products and
services.

~~~
kalleboo
* we have been conditioned to believe that bugs and data loss are just something that happen

They're something that happen to unregulated services that cost $8/month. If I
paid $8/month for electricity, water or Internet access, yeah I'd expect
yearly blackouts. To get an SLA you have to pay more.

~~~
rayiner
Would this bug not have happened with Dropbox for Business?

And didn't Microsoft make an absolute fortune releasing buggy as shit software
throughout the entire 1990's?

------
Aardwolf
I don't trust anything called "sync".

I trust file operations "move", "copy" and "remove".

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?

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.

~~~
icebraining
Here "sync" means what Dropbox says it means. The answers to your questions
are well defined in their software, even if to some other software, they might
be different.

 _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._

The source and destination is always clear. It's to the server and from the
server. Dropbox uses a star topology, not P2P.

You'd get the same result if you used rsync with source and destination, if
you passed --delete, which is equivalent to what Dropbox does.

~~~
Aardwolf
"The source and destination is always clear. It's to the server and from the
server."

That's exactly what I mean by not clear: to the server and from the server are
the exact opposites. So if something is not present on one side, it can do two
things to make both sides equal: it can delete it from the one side, or it can
copy it to the other side. If all it has is a "sync" button, not a "sync to
server" or "sync from server" button, it's not clear what it will do.

Something that deletes files shouldn't be called sync, but should clearly be
marked as a delete operation. And deleting something from one location should
not have the surprise effect of deleting it on other locations too, unless
it's called "remove _everywhere_ ".

~~~
JoeAltmaier
File sync with multiple devices is fraught with danger. Remember the old
'briefcase' on the Windows desktop? There's just no way to distinguish 'I
don't want this file on this device' from "I don't want this file on any
device'".

~~~
icebraining
In Dropbox, it's very simple: the former is simply not supported at all. Your
file should be in all devices or none (mobile excepted).

~~~
bruceboughton
No, they have Selective Sync.

~~~
icebraining
That's at the folder level, not file level.

~~~
bruceboughton
True, but it does put lie to:

>> Your file should be in all devices or none

------
steven2012
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.

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.

~~~
DanBC
Did that work?

Would it have been more effective to just provide him with a list of stuff - a
choice of two drives; a choice of two softwares (with really easy URLs to buy
and download) and instructions for using and testing.

That could be a gift for birthday or Xmas?

~~~
steven2012
I bought him a new hard drive, copied the photos over and gave him
instructions on how to do it. He hasn't bothered to update his backup once,
and it's been about 5 years and his photo collection has only grown.

~~~
kngspook
I'm thinking of buying a CrashPlan Business account (my corp uses the
Enterprise version) for my family for this reason. I set them up with
TimeMachine, but even plugging in a USB drive has proven to be too much to
remember.

------
CaptainZapp
I use Dropbox for sharing pictures, but would never even dream to use a cloud
based service for backup purposes.

Granted, Jan's case is a bit more complex and I'm really sorry for his loss.

Stories like that should really be a lesson to everybody never to completely
trust a cloud based service as your main backup.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
true_religion
Why not? I find it pretty great in terms of backups (though that's not my
purpose for doing it.)

I have copies of my files on my work machine, my laptop, my wife's laptop, my
gaming machine, and ofcourse dropbox's servers itself.

I could lose any one of those without losing the bunch thanks to dropbox
synching things.

Sure it doesn't help in the case of deletion but its great for the more common
case of "my machine suddenly won't boot".

~~~
Silhouette
_I could lose any one of those without losing the bunch thanks to dropbox
synching things._

If it's due to a hardware failure, sure.

If it's due to a bug as in this case, or an accidental deletion that went
unnoticed for some reason, or corruption of a key file by the application that
created it, or malware encrypting your entire filesystem until you pay a
ransom, not so much.

 _Please_ don't consider a bunch of sync'd copies to be a complete backup
solution, whether the mechanism is a RAID setup on your local machine, or an
automatic sync offsite, or a Dropbox-style cloud service, or anything else.
These tools are guarding against one specific and relatively common failure
mode, which is useful, but they do not guard against a lot of other things
that can and sometimes do go wrong.

------
simi_
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.

------
petercooper
_If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again._

Simplify to _If you only have a sole backup, think again._ 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.

~~~
paulmalenke
Also, in the case of removing it from your computer and only storing it on the
"backup". It is not really a backup if it only exists in one location.

~~~
kalleboo
This this this. The parable I've heard is that even two locations isn't a
backup.

------
SunboX
This happened to me (in German):
[http://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2012/04/18/fur-immer-
ausges...](http://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2012/04/18/fur-immer-ausgesperrt-
bei-google-eine-leidensgeschichte/)

~~~
jabiko
The linked article is about someone who managed to lock himself out of his
Google account. No word about Dropbox.

------
je42
This is clearly a problem for the reputation of dropbox.

On their website they market the service as:

"Even if your phone goes for a swim, your stuff is always safe in Dropbox and
can be restored in a snap."

With this message in mind, and a valuation of roughly >>10$ BILLION<<.

I think, you can have very very high expectations regarding the data retention
of their service.

Also, the whole point of using a service like dropbox is to remove
friction/time investment regarding the standard backup/sync tasks.

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.

------
wrs
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!"

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.

------
restlessmedia
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.

~~~
morganvachon
My wife does the same; she has a Snapfish account. She will have them print
and mail her the most important pictures from a set, while trusting the ones
she doesn't care as much about to our home server and Facebook (the former for
long-term storage, the latter for convenient access). Since she has to order a
certain number of prints every year to keep the account open, and it comes
with unlimited free storage, it works out well for her.

The only exception was our wedding photos. We have a set of prints directly
from the studio hired to take the pictures, as well as a digital copy on DVD
from them. We also have those digital files backed up on our home server, a
computer at my parents' house, Dropbox, Snapfish, and both of our Facebook
accounts. The photography company also has long-term storage that we would
have access to if all else failed. That's about as redundant as we can get
without spending a ton of money, but it's more than most people seem to have.

------
PhantomGremlin
Dropbox has _one of the worst websites on the Internet_. Seriously!

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"?

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.

Someone else here has succinctly summarized the situation [2]:

    
    
       One reason I'm not worth a billion dollars
       is I would never have let Dropbox ship like this!
    

[1] [https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade](https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade) [2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105548](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105548)

------
yoda_sl
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)

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.

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.

~~~
slantyyz
I use my Time Capsule's USB port to attach an external drive that is shared so
that Crashplan can backup to a folder on it. That's in addition to using
Crashplan Central for cloud backups and Time Machine.

------
pierreio
> "you should backup"

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?

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).

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?

~~~
walterbell
> Local storage will not.

External backup drives continue to increase in size at a falling cost per GB.

It is cheaper and lower latency to store/retrieve a large amount of data
locally than remotely, unless you believe that the current glut of "near-free
cloud storage" will continue indefinitely. Market cycles suggest otherwise.

> Publish it or lose it

Why do social networks store your photos "for free"?

------
filmgirlcw
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.

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.

------
Fofer
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.

Sorry this happened to you, but better backup practices could have avoided it
easily.

------
JoeAltmaier
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.

~~~
therealmocker
Since all the files are sync'ed to the computer, nothing would be lost unless
selective sync was enabled.

~~~
rockdoe
A comparable bug would be that when the server goes away (Dropbox closes), the
client starts deleting all local files.

------
profsnuggles
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.

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.

~~~
catshirt
i think people are still struggling because creating _real_ backups still
seems like kind of a pain in the ass compared to cloud syncing.

what's currently the most convenient and simple way to store multiple local
backups?

~~~
profsnuggles
It _IS_ a pain and I don't know that there is a way to fix that. As I said
though you have to decide what your data is worth to you.

I personally use [http://duplicity.nongnu.org/](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/)
and a semi-complicated system of cron and bash script to backup my files to my
local server, some flash drives and s3.

------
vondur
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.

------
codva
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.

------
ecnahc515
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.

What does HN think? Safe if I went with 2 cloud backup providers?

------
servowire
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.

Takes a few hours, I like to burn all my data to Bluray (50GB per disk) while
watching a movie.

Store the bluray data sets at a friend's house and never worry again.

------
uladzislau
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.

------
shimshim
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.

~~~
fulafel
It's a hassle to learn, admin, and it's more likely to eat your data. Many
people do not have real internet connections at home so they could assign it
an ip and access it remotely. Plus it's hard to buy a good one unless you go
for generous overkill. And after 2 years you have yet another vendor abandoned
Linux device with remote vulnerabilities on your home net.

(I still prefer it to cloud storage though)

~~~
shimshim
Thanks for the point of view. I personally love the Synology at home and have
a spare disk for cases where I may have a failure. I would say, barring
something catastrophic, that I am set for another 3-5 years, which is fine. I
would most likely buy a new model Synology 3 years from now and continue
expansion. They also offer another disk shelf you can addon.

------
aaronem
> If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again.

Good advice.

> Without making a mistake, you might lose your files.

If Dropbox, or any other single service or method, constitutes your entire
backup strategy, then the mistake is already made.

~~~
RoadRunner_23
I agree that single service or method should not be entire backup strategy. I
backup pictures and important files to two seperate external discs, besides
desktop's storage.

Sorry to hear, but sometimes it happens. Look at the positive side. you will
have more precious moments to look forward to and those lost pictures, you
will have to go old fashioned way of recollecting. Do you remember the
day...kind.

------
rcthompson
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.

------
danbee
The moment you only have one copy of your files _anywhere_ you don't have a
backup.

I've heard it said that if a file doesn't exist in at least three different
places it might as well not exist.

~~~
kngspook
Exactly. (I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find this.)

------
the4aces
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.

~~~
jancurn
Many thanks for your advice, this was the first thing I tried, unfortunately
without any success...

------
mhartl
Thanks for the tip on the Packrat feature. I didn't know about that. Added.

------
johnnyladders
If it's not saved in three places, it's not saved.

------
mahouse
Well, sorry to say this, but if all of your photos were stored only online...

~~~
morganvachon
It depends on how you look at it. They were stored online (Dropbox servers) as
well as locally (Macbook). The problem is that a bug in Dropbox's client
turned a de-sync operation into a delete operation. So one way to see it is
that even having local storage was not safe because the sync was flawed.
Another possible way to look at it is if your only local copy is synced with
the cloud, then effectively your only storage is online.

