10 ms·

Dropbox is undeniably better. It gets synching right and this is so incredibly important. People should be rooting for Dropbox, not hoping for its demise. Every

by lemevi 11y ago

Dropbox is undeniably better. It gets synching right and this is so incredibly important. People should be rooting for Dropbox, not hoping for its demise. Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right.

Spooky23 11y ago
Amen. OneDrive for Business is a great example of screwed up sync. Whomever made the call to release that steaming pile should be flogged. Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client. When the MS product guys were pretending that our network/workstation image was the reason that OneDrive sync broke, I took a laptop out of the box, put Windows 8 on it, streamed down Office ProPlus and signed in a dummy user with a small file tree. Then we wrote a script that created a text file and saved it to a directory every 3 hours. Than we left it. The client broke itself after 2-3 days with no user activity. With Dropbox, I had a laptop in my basement that I forgot about for 3 years. I turned it on, signed into Dropbox, and it magically just worked. So sync issues. No conflicts.
- lemevi 11y ago
  > Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client. It's already too late. They've shown they can't be trusted to sync files. It's ridiculous to me to even consider trusting them with my files. Dropbox actually has had a problem in the past but it was a bug they fixed immediately. They care about this so much.
coldtea 11y ago
>Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right. If they rely on Dropbox getting syncing right to not lose "important files, photos of loved ones, ideas and important documents" then they are doing it wrong. They should backup anyway, and only then trust Dropbox for plain syncing. Dropbox is not backup.
- lemevi 11y ago
  You are not considering the implications of how synching works. How do you know you lost files? I back up with Time Machine, Time Machine runs every hour and creates a limited set of back ups I can go back to. Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file. You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >You are not considering the implications of how synching works. Actually it's because I'm considering it that I advocate this. >How do you know you lost files? You look for them and they can't be found. And keeping a tally and/or checksum per folder in your backup doesn't hurt either. >Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file. In your case it's simple, you can just go to Time Machine, as it archives all versions of the files, changed and/or deleted or not. >You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't. Actually with Time Machine you sort of have. But, more essentially, you don't need "1 year's worth of hourly backups?", unless you're doing something very important and create new such files multiple times per day (e.g. if you're a business and store customer data, or a new site and you have your news database). For stuff like "archived projects", "family pictures" or "music collection" just take incremental backups of them, and set your backup program to never delete any files during sync, but just put them in a "deleted" folder. For stuff that changes fast, like working documents, emails and such, take backups with Time Machine (which happen in "real time"). Every few months take a full backup. Besides network backup, never backup in just one external disk (and test your backup disks from time to time), and don't keep them in one place. That is, if that stuff is very important to you. Some people can lose most of it, as it's mainly them hoarding digital BS. If you're a business, OTOH, backup is PART of what you should do anyway.

by lemevi 11y ago

Spooky23 11y ago

Amen. OneDrive for Business is a great example of screwed up sync. Whomever made the call to release that steaming pile should be flogged. Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client. When the MS product guys were pretending that our network/workstation image was the reason that OneDrive sync broke, I took a laptop out of the box, put Windows 8 on it, streamed down Office ProPlus and signed in a dummy user with a small file tree. Then we wrote a script that created a text file and saved it to a directory every 3 hours. Than we left it. The client broke itself after 2-3 days with no user activity. With Dropbox, I had a laptop in my basement that I forgot about for 3 years. I turned it on, signed into Dropbox, and it magically just worked. So sync issues. No conflicts.

lemevi 11y ago
> Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client. It's already too late. They've shown they can't be trusted to sync files. It's ridiculous to me to even consider trusting them with my files. Dropbox actually has had a problem in the past but it was a bug they fixed immediately. They care about this so much.

coldtea 11y ago

>Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right. If they rely on Dropbox getting syncing right to not lose "important files, photos of loved ones, ideas and important documents" then they are doing it wrong. They should backup anyway, and only then trust Dropbox for plain syncing. Dropbox is not backup.

lemevi 11y ago
You are not considering the implications of how synching works. How do you know you lost files? I back up with Time Machine, Time Machine runs every hour and creates a limited set of back ups I can go back to. Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file. You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >You are not considering the implications of how synching works. Actually it's because I'm considering it that I advocate this. >How do you know you lost files? You look for them and they can't be found. And keeping a tally and/or checksum per folder in your backup doesn't hurt either. >Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file. In your case it's simple, you can just go to Time Machine, as it archives all versions of the files, changed and/or deleted or not. >You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't. Actually with Time Machine you sort of have. But, more essentially, you don't need "1 year's worth of hourly backups?", unless you're doing something very important and create new such files multiple times per day (e.g. if you're a business and store customer data, or a new site and you have your news database). For stuff like "archived projects", "family pictures" or "music collection" just take incremental backups of them, and set your backup program to never delete any files during sync, but just put them in a "deleted" folder. For stuff that changes fast, like working documents, emails and such, take backups with Time Machine (which happen in "real time"). Every few months take a full backup. Besides network backup, never backup in just one external disk (and test your backup disks from time to time), and don't keep them in one place. That is, if that stuff is very important to you. Some people can lose most of it, as it's mainly them hoarding digital BS. If you're a business, OTOH, backup is PART of what you should do anyway.