Howdy

I have been using Dropbox to act as a cloud backup for files, photos, home videos, etc. and to be able to share files between devices, upload photos from various phones in the family and then have them show up in my primary PC, etc.

This week I noticed that a bunch of folders and files had been deleted, and when I started to look into it I noticed the hard drive I was using for Dropbox on my PC was no longer visible. Still not sure if it's a HDD failure or an issue with power supply or cables, but once the drive disappeared, Dropbox treated it as deleting the files so it started to delete the files on the cloud site. I've been struggling to get files restored on the website for now and have turned it off on my PC so it won't keep deleting files from the "missing" drive. Reading through the community forum on the Dropbox site indicates this has been an issue others have been facing for years and Dropbox doesn't really support having the folder on an external drive or drive other than the primary in the PC. I don't have enough space on that drive so I have to use additional drives to house my files.

What service are y'all using to backup your files and are you happy with them? Considering upgrading Google Photos to 2 TB but not sure what other options might be better.


I have ordered a new HDD as a replacement, although I connected the offending Seagate drive with an external USB adapter and it seems to be working right now. Maybe that indicates the issue is with the power supply or something other than the drive itself?

thanks for the advice

I was able to move my Dropbox folder to a different drive when the standard C drive was too small.

https://help.dropbox.com/installs/move-dropbox-folder

I don't use the sync Desktop or Documents folder options though. Not sure if that matters. I always prefer to choose whether I want to save something locally to the device or to my cloud (although I almost save to the cloud).

I also use GoogleDrive as another personal cloud (backup Dropbox files occasionally) and have OneDrive through work. Both of those have worked fine too.

I paid for a 2-year iDrive subscription (my wife's laptop / my laptop) and have been happy. We've never had any issues backing up or restoring data.

https://www.idrive.com/

CrashPlan worked well for us. BackBlaze worked well for my small company

In reply to merlin403

merlin403 said:

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I paid for a 2-year iDrive subscription (my wife's laptop / my laptop) and have been happy. We've never had any issues backing up or restoring data.

https://www.idrive.com/

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I also use iDrive personally and for my clients. Nice thing is, one account covers all your devices. So you can install on all your computers, phones etc.

In reply to Roll the Bones

Roll the Bones said:

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Howdy

I have been using Dropbox to act as a cloud backup for files, photos, home videos, etc. and to be able to share files between devices, upload photos from various phones in the family and then have them show up in my primary PC, etc.

This week I noticed that a bunch of folders and files had been deleted, and when I started to look into it I noticed the hard drive I was using for Dropbox on my PC was no longer visible. Still not sure if it's a HDD failure or an issue with power supply or cables, but once the drive disappeared, Dropbox treated it as deleting the files so it started to delete the files on the cloud site. I've been struggling to get files restored on the website for now and have turned it off on my PC so it won't keep deleting files from the "missing" drive. Reading through the community forum on the Dropbox site indicates this has been an issue others have been facing for years and Dropbox doesn't really support having the folder on an external drive or drive other than the primary in the PC. I don't have enough space on that drive so I have to use additional drives to house my files.

What service are y'all using to backup your files and are you happy with them? Considering upgrading Google Photos to 2 TB but not sure what other options might be better.


I have ordered a new HDD as a replacement, although I connected the offending Seagate drive with an external USB adapter and it seems to be working right now. Maybe that indicates the issue is with the power supply or something other than the drive itself?

thanks for the advice

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There is a difference between backup and archives.

Typically, a backup service will keep the files for a short time after they disappear from your hard drive. That is because they are not an archival service. It is not intended to use the service for off-line storage, but to mirror the drive(s) on your computer.

In contrast, my 6+ terabytes of storage on ProtonDrive is not a backup. Rather, I copy the files there I want to save and they stay there.

One thing I use it for is to make backups of the user data on my hard drive on my primary workstation with borg backup and then copy those backups to ProtonDrive.

I keep my photos and other stuff on my Synology NAS which backs up to Amazon S3 storage a few times a week (incremental backups). I have been happy with the setup and have had to restore once when my old NAS crashed. It was completely painless.

In reply to Breggy Popup

Bregxit said:

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I keep my photos and other stuff on my Synology NAS which backs up to Amazon S3 storage a few times a week (incremental backups). I have been happy with the setup and have had to restore once when my old NAS crashed. It was completely painless.

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What app do you use to backup from Synology to S3?

In reply to Tailgate88

Tailgate88 said:

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Bregxit said:

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I keep my photos and other stuff on my Synology NAS which backs up to Amazon S3 storage a few times a week (incremental backups). I have been happy with the setup and have had to restore once when my old NAS crashed. It was completely painless.

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What app do you use to backup from Synology to S3?

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Hyper Backup. It is built in to Synology. You do have to set up your S3 storage in AWS first and it isn't free. The data volume I have at the moment runs me about $30/month.

In reply to Breggy Popup Thx

In reply to Breggy Popup $30/month on S3? How much data do you have and on what storage class? Sounds like a lot.

In reply to CapCity12thMan

CapCity12thMan said:

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$30/month on S3? How much data do you have and on what storage class? Sounds like a lot.

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About 2TB in S3 standard.

$30/mo is probably a lot, but I like having a solid backup solution for the stuff in there like all of our photos going back 30 years (most of it) and other stuff.

In reply to Breggy Popup Right I get that but s3 standard is the most expensive storage class. You could literally
Be paying a fraction of that moving it to s3 glacier

In reply to CapCity12thMan

CapCity12thMan said:

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Right I get that but s3 standard is the most expensive instance class. You could literally
Be paying a fraction of that moving it to s3 glacier

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I could, and was at one point. I had to restore from glacier one time...and the name checked out. It took over a week to restore my data. I restored from S3 once and it took about 6 hours.

In reply to Breggy Popup there's other in-betweens you should consider to save some money, just my opinion:

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/

Or if you think you will recover more recent files before older ones, get some lifecycle policies in there to manage that for you over time.

HTH

In reply to Breggy Popup

Breggy Popup said:

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Tailgate88 said:

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Bregxit said:

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I keep my photos and other stuff on my Synology NAS which backs up to Amazon S3 storage a few times a week (incremental backups). I have been happy with the setup and have had to restore once when my old NAS crashed. It was completely painless.

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What app do you use to backup from Synology to S3?

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Hyper Backup. It is built in to Synology. You do have to set up your S3 storage in AWS first and it isn't free. The data volume I have at the moment runs me about $30/month.

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EDIT: Just realized I'm using cloud sync on the Synology to backup to backblaze, not Hyper Backup, and that works perfectly for my use case.