The PeerTube instance that I have been uploading to is no more. I think there are around 70 edits of mine that are no longer accessible. If there was a catbox link, they may still work. This represents hundreds of hours of work that I did that have simply vanished. If a link is broken, let me know and I can see if I still have the files for it. Thank you all for watching the things I’ve made/

  • Brekky@lemmy.world
    4·
    15 hours ago

    So if I save on my laptop, back up to a separate hard drive, and then share to Dropbox, if I then suffer a house fire that takes out 1 and 2 do I also lose my Dropbox files?

    • aeronmelon@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours ago

      You’re suppose to be able to log into a new device and recover all of your files. But I have heard horror stories (particularly involving Dropbox) where the lack of files on the new device confused the service into syncing that blank slate across all devices. I have personally had issues with iCloud where I delete a file and try to re-add it only for iCloud to keep re-deleting the file every time because it thinks it forgot to remove them all.

      Cloud syncing is not built with backing up in mind. In situations where the syncing service becomes your only copy of everything and you do recover it all, you’re just lucky nothing happened before you got to it.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
      5·
      14 hours ago

      Synchronized files are not backup.

      While synchronized files may save you if you get lucky, proper backups are things that work without that requirement of “luck”.

      It also doesn’t mean synchronized files are useless. It only means they are not backup.

      • Brekky@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 hours ago

        I get that, just these files get updated regularly so synchronicity is important than independent files. I get for a will I’d want independent files since that is (hopefully) rarely changed except maybe once a year.

    • SatyrSack@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      14 hours ago

      I think your question is related to this part:

      It’s also important to remember that syncing services like DropBox or iCloud are NOT backups. If a file is deleted or damaged in one location, that change will sync to all the other locations and the previous version of the file is very difficult to recover, even by the engineers running those services.

      In your hypothetical scenario: no, your Dropbox files would not be lost. After you lose your laptop and HDD, if you were to buy a new laptop, you should be able to download your files from Dropbox just fine.

      What that comment is talking about is how when your local files are synchronized with Dropbox, any changes locally get synchronized out to your Dropbox version. If you delete the file locally, a request gets sent out to the Dropbox servers to delete it there. If your file gets corrupted locally, that newer corrupted version gets sent off to the Dropbox servers to overwrite the intact version.

      But if your laptop burns up, it doesn’t send off a request to delete or corrupt the file on the Dropbox servers or anything. You just lose your local copy.

      • Brekky@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 hours ago

        Thank you for answering my question. I was half awake when I typed it and if I had thought a little longer I would have figured that out eventually. :)