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> It concerns me that the top several comments are some variation of "you shouldn't trust the cloud with your data."

No, it's "you shouldn't trust one single thing with your data". Hardware fails. OSes have bugs (OS X's "space in your drive name and we delete your user folder.") Services have unexpected gotchas. This is why you never store anything in only one place.

A sync service by definition is not a separate place (unless he had found a bug in the Packrat feature)




My point is that, for some reason, we have been conditioned to believe that bugs and data loss are just something that happen as opposed to something that service providers, who we pay money to, are charged with avoiding. We hold software to a much lower standard of quality than we hold other products and services.


* we have been conditioned to believe that bugs and data loss are just something that happen

They're something that happen to unregulated services that cost $8/month. If I paid $8/month for electricity, water or Internet access, yeah I'd expect yearly blackouts. To get an SLA you have to pay more.


Would this bug not have happened with Dropbox for Business?

And didn't Microsoft make an absolute fortune releasing buggy as shit software throughout the entire 1990's?


No, it's "you shouldn't trust one single thing with your data"

Which is why he has local copies on several systems and the copy in the cloud with Dropbox.

The nasty thing here is that Dropbox effectively deleted the "local" backups.


Dropbox deleting the local copies are effectively what the author wanted to happen. The author wanted Dropbox to:

1) Remove the local copies.

2) Keep the remote copies.

3) Stop syncing those folders.

The author explicitly states that the goal was to use the Dropbox copy as the only copy (i.e. the backup).


Oops, you're right. But the way I read the report, even having other systems with local copies would've gotten data loss, because it would have removed those local copies as well (which was not the idea when enabling selective sync only on the laptop).




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