30 days of version history but how many versions?

[bohende]

I'm asking this in the context of file safety. I'm moving away from backing up data on my personal computer. Instead I'd love to just throw everything into dropbox and let you do the backing up for me.

If I get LOCKY'ed and one of my files gets encrypted then I can restore a previous version as long as I do so within 30 days. That's awesome!

What if LOCKY encrypts my file and then updates it a million times? Surely you won't save all million file versions so where would I be in that sitation? I have a file that I update many times every day and I currently see a lot of previous verisons so I'm not terribly worried but where's the cutoff?

Thanks,

Bo

[Mark · Accepted solution]

As long as its within 30 days you can recover it 🙂

Dropbox simply saves the million changes, not the file 1 million times.

HOWEVER please do NOT rely on just 1 backup system.... what happens if you dont notice a corrupt file for 31 days?!

[Rich · Accepted solution]

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bohende wrote:

I'm moving away from backing up data on my personal computer. Instead I'd love to just throw everything into dropbox and let you do the backing up for me.

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I wouldn't recommend that. Dropbox isn't a backup service. Yes, it has some backup-like functionality, but it is not a backup service and should not be used as one. There are far better services out there if your goal is file backup. many people here use CrashPlan.

That being said... Dropbox hasn't, to my knowledge, published any limits in this regard. The best example I can give is a text file I have that is appended often. Since Saturday morning there have been 2740 edits to the file, and I am able to recover any one of them. I could go back further, but it would probably take me hours to scroll back 30 days to see how many versions of the file are kept.

There may be a limit, but if there is, we'll likely never know what it is.

[bohende]

I'm confused what a backup service can do that drop-box can't. Data is stored offsite to protect my data in the case I lose a device, accidently delete a file, or get attacked with ransomware.

Is this an eggs-in-one-basket issue or a warning about not having a >30 day recovery window?

[Rich]

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bohende wrote:

Is this an eggs-in-one-basket issue or a warning about not having a >30 day recovery window?

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Both.

[Mark · Accepted solution]

Its also a warning about restores.... try and do a large restore from Dropbox (rollback).... its very difficult. If you need it done quickly you are out of luck.

Simply put Dropbox isnt designed as a 'backup' tool - it just does it as a byproduct.

[bohende]

Ahh! I didn't think of that. I imagine reverting to a previous version for 100 files would be painful. Thank you!