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By that logic _nothing_ is a backup. A disconnected hard-drive could be lost in a fire, theft, physical damage, you could stop paying your rent and your landlor

By that logic _nothing_ is a backup. A disconnected hard-drive could be lost in a fire, theft, physical damage, you could stop paying your rent and your landlord could repossess it... Telling people that any redundant copy that isn't 100% reliable (i.e., everything) isn't a backup is not a good way to get people to take backups.

romwell 5y ago
This is not correct. While a hard-drive could be lost in a fire, etc., the state of availability of the data on it is decoupled from that of the system that has the data that's being backed up. And that's the entire point! Take that as a definition: a backup is a redundant copy whose availability is independent of that of the original. FYI, from one of the comments below: >I've "lost" (had to restore from personal backup drives) data from Dropbox due to an error made by their support staff during a mass rollback, which was itself needed due to the Dropbox client interpreting a drive disconnection as a mass file deletion.
- Too 5y ago
  How decoupled is decoupled enough though? Does it need to be air-gapped? You could access your dropbox data from computer B even while it is syncing files from computer A. Together with the 30 day file recovery window, this seems fairly decoupled to me. Assuming that the dropbox file history and the dropbox normal sync is seen as two separate systems. Now you shouldn't have this as your only backup, but combine it with a second service with similar guarantees and even if you wipe your local drive and the wipe get propagated to dropbox, you are still backed by the 30 day history inside both dropbox and the second service, which are decoupled from each other.