mistakenly used dropbox as backup

[sunnymonday]

I have successfully used dropbox for sharing files.

But I also thought of it as a place to backup my hard drive, and from reading around here, I see that was a big mistake. I thought that it was storing these files somewhere else (the CLOUD!), not on my hard drive. So I now have three different backups in my dropbox folder.

I'm worried that if I start deleting these backup folders, I will also delete the original files from their original location. How do I delete these three folders without losing all of my originals? Many thanks.

[Mark · Accepted solution]

The question can only be answered depending upon how you put the files inside the Dropbox folder on your computer to sync.

If you MOVED them to Dropbox and then delete them you will lose your only copy.
If you COPIED them to Dropbox they should still be in the original location.

[samhtester]

Hi Mark,

Further to this question, can you please clarify some things for me?

I have had bad experiences with external hard drives and after having 2 bomb out on me so joiing Dropbox Pro for me is a solution for offsite backup and cloud access at the same time, without the hassle of backing up to an external hard-drive which for me seems to get more and more costly as time goes on!

So to ensure thie is 'safe' enough to depend on, I wanted to check:

1. If my PC harddrive had a meltdown, would dropbox start deleting files as it is looking at the sync destination and seeing nothing there? If the PC was on the networkm, but the hard drive was not available, what would happen? I am in the middle of syncing 1TB currently.

2. If I needed to restore everything due to a failure, could Dropbox send me a 1TB harddrive instead of me taking 1-2 weeks pulling everything back down?

The best practise I can see here is to get another hard-drive but after having 2 fizz on me in the last three years I am a little reluctant to splash out again, especially as I've splashed out on DropBox Pro as well.

Keen to get some advice from yourself, or anyone else on the forum for that matter.

[Rich]

1) That depends on how the drive fails.

If certain sectors fail and files start to go bad, Dropbox could potentially sync those files. However, if that were to happen you have 30 days to recover files through Dropbox (or one year with Pro and Extended Version History).

If the drive were to fail all at once, then Dropbox, assuming it was still running, would see that the entire folder was missing and would stop syncing. Again, if anything were to go missing, you could recover.

2) No. They do not provide that service.

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I thought that it was storing these files somewhere else (the CLOUD!), not on my hard drive.

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You are storing them somewhere else, in the cloud in fact, but they ALSO exist on your local computer. Dropbox is a file synchronization service. Anything you put in the local Dropbox folder is synced to the cloud and across any other linked computers.

[blanny]

Stumbled on your post as I was looking for info on my situation. I run two macs; one at home one at my studio. I left the one at the studio running (completing a long print job) and went home. 2 days later, I'm working at home (due to covid) and Dropbox starts announcing that it's deleting files. This goes on and on and so I start to panic and pause syncing. Sure enough, I've lost thousands of customer files. So I drive to the office and discover that the hard drive on the office machine has died. Here's the bit I don't like. Dropbox has interpreted the drive failure as me having actively deleted the files on the (dead) drive and then updated its directory accordingly and applied the deletions to my machine at home. Yes I can undelete them but this will take days. So I suppose my question is: is there no way for Dropbox to detect the death of a drive? Maybe by pinging it for a response or something? I have to tell you this has shaken my faith in Dropbox and I say that as an evangelist.