![[Meta] A lot of my OC edits are gone.](https://media.tenor.com/LqVVm2ubyXwAAAAM/spock-computer.gif){kind=link}
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/
Everyone remember, nothing uploaded to the internet is backed up. You can’t count on the “nothing on the internet is ever deleted” axiom to save you. Because SO MUCH of the internet has already been lost to history.
Ideally, you want your personal data in three locations. One copy on the computer or device you use where it can be freely accessed and edited. One copy backed up locally (external drive or physical media) that is archived but can be gotten to at a moment’s notice. And one copy off-site (a copy on another computer somewhere else or a cloud backup service) that can be requested or sent back to you should something destroy the first two backups, like a fire.
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.
I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad here, this is as good a time as any to repeat the importance of getting into the habit of backing up irreplaceable data, or setting up some kind of automated service. There are a lot of options and they’re usually pretty cheap.
(I pay $9 USD a month to BackBlaze to backup and keep 10TB of data and changes going back one year. But even keeping a spindle of DVDs in your closet is better than nothing.)
Sorry to hear about this, Jawa, I’ve been there multiple times. Hope you can recover most (if not all) of the stuff you lost.
Assume anything you want to have saved on the Internet is already gone. Assume anything you never want published on the Internet will stay there forever.
I do follow these guidelines for stuff that is legitimately important. These were all silly edits that I made in hopes of making people smile, and maybe laugh. Nothing of true importance was lost, aside from making someone marginally happier if only for a brief moment. I can recover a good bit, but I will have to revenger them all which will take time.
I disagree that they are not important. The OC you make is like a scrapbook of that point in your life. And like you said, it makes people smile. I think you should backup your memes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I think your question is related to this part:
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.
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. :)
The basic concept of the 3-2-1 backup strategy is that three copies of the data are made to be protected, the copies are stored on two different types of storage media and one copy of the data is sent offsite