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Comment by goostavos | Hacker News Reader

How many of you is this affecting? I'd be curious to know how many keep the only copy of their file on dropbox, or any cloud service for that matter. I've never trusted any service enough to be solely responsibly for my important files.

I use Dropbox primarily as a tool to synch content between my desktop/laptop/phone, but any significant change I make to those files gets saved locally 100% of the time.

I am not a very trusting man.

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This affects me, though through backups and using Dropbox primarily as a sync service I don't think I've lost anything (I've got a decent sized list of zero byte files to go through).

I've confirmed files that should contain something (nav images for a website) and that do contain something in the original source folders stored elsewhere are empty in Dropbox. Interestingly, Ubuntu is one of the clients syncing to my Dropbox folders.

Somewhere between 2000-2892 Files...

I'm turning Dropbox off now and disabling it on startup.

I'm thankful for this post, now to figure out what's going on.

My photos folder was zeroed... =/

2 files here. it did delete a boilerplate site i was working on...thank goodness i backed it up locally.

I think I have a couple files affected, but I can't tell for sure--thankfully, none of them are critical, and may just be generated as temp files.

That said, I'm definitely writing a script to do nightly backups of the contents of my dropbox folder going forward.

Just use something like rsnapshot http://www.rsnapshot.org/

Two files were affected, but I have local copies fortunately.

I don't keep anything of any serious importance in Dropbox, but it'd be a major drag and surely a large cause of versioning mistakes to maintain two copies on your local filesystem. I mean, it's built/advertised as being something that you can just treat like a regular magic folder.

Don't do this. I had some critical files which this stupid Dropbox sync system deleted without asking because I had removed the local copy of the folder on my machine. I couldn't even find a simple setting there, which says "don't delete files while syncing", or even something like "warn before deleting files". It totally sucks.

I'm afraid you have simply failed to grasp the meaning of syncing. The whole point of Dropbox is to have a folder which always has exactly the same contents on all your Dropbox installations, and the copy on their servers.

Well, if you know a bit more about sync, there are different types of it(One way, two way, 'echo only' etc.). Sure, I failed to understand all of how Dropbox worked (and that's why lost my files), but probably the previous sync software like SyncToy from MS had pampered me. Have you ever done contacts syncing on phones? If you look properly, it will give you all different options for syncing. Many sync software are extremely cautious about deleting multiple files on the server, and that is what I was expecting from Dropbox too.

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