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Comment by mech4bg | Hacker News Reader

It surprises me that someone would rely entirely on dropbox as their backup tool AND primary file location, especially when it happy manipulates the files locally.

I backup to an external HDD and to the cloud and still have the originals (as well as having extra copies again of my music and photos synced across my computers) - the more redundancy you have the better.

It sucks that so many people need bad stuff to happen to them to do something about it - I'm so thankful that storage became so cheap before anything really catastrophic happened to me. I've lost data in the past but it was back when so many things were offline, nowadays it's CRITICAL to have a good backup plan.

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I didn't go into detail on my backup strategy in the post, but it's (slightly) better than that. I only use Dropbox for media - music, images, photos. Some if it is irreplaceable, but none of it is life-crucial. That stuff is backed up separately, and copied to private space on my web server.

I think I consider photos to be some of the most important stuff to be backed up... obviously you can live without them, but as you said, some photos are irreplaceable, and can hold so much meaning. At least with Facebook / Picasa Web Albums many of the most important photos have been backed up (potentially at a lower quality).

To be fair I never would have considered such a bug when using dropbox - I would probably have considered it safe considering you have a local copy of your data, especially since as other pointed out they present themselves as a backup service.

I almost got hit by this locally actually, I synchronize folders against multiple PCs, and the exact same thing happened, and a number of files had their bytes zeroed out and then this was propagated through the network. Thankfully I spotted it before all copies were overwritten and fixed it, but that's where you also want something like Time Machine.

Ugh, so many ways to lose data, even when you're doing the 'right' thing!

You're right, photos can be irreplaceable and I'm probably going to change how I back them up now. My choice of what is and isn't in Dropbox isn't actually based on importance -- but on what I both want on my laptop, but would want to restore if the laptop were stolen. Kind of weird criteria, but it (at one time) made sense to me.

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