I think what people are trying to convey is that while you might be able to do it, there are many, many users of this forum who have minimal expertise in using computers, and it might be unwise to seem to encourage them to use solutions that might cause problems for them in the future. I think it is often difficult for us to realise just how limited some users may be in their knowledge. I am reminded of the day I was helping a friend who had been using computers for many years, and I double-clicked on something to open it. He looked rather startled and said “I didn’t know you could do that!” I would humbly suggest that on a forum like this, it is probably best to put forward solutions that do not have hidden catches for those who are less expert. I think we can accept the point that it is possible to use Dropbox in the way that you suggest, but I personally wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless I was sure they really knew what they were doing. All sorts of things are possible, but not for everybody. I once saw an ex-RAF fighter pilot performing low-level aerobatics in a glider over our airfield. It was magnificent, but my heart sank because I knew I was going to have to go round all the less experienced pilots who had been watching and tell them not to attempt anything like it, because they would kill themselves. There was a kind of mindset that could be encountered quite frequently which we called “monkey see, monkey do”. Plenty of people didn’t really understand what they were seeing, but thought they did, and a fair number of crashes are caused by that. To wrap up, there is a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect) which suggests that people with a high level of expertise tend to underestimate their ability, and assume that others can do what they can. The opposite also holds, in that people with a low level of expertise tend to over-estimate their skill, with potentially unfortunate results. I feel it is worth bearing that in mind, and trying to tailor advice to the needs of the person asking for it.
That’s funny, because Dropbox’s own documentation has all sorts of caveats and warnings that show this is not a backup solution. (Unless, of course, you’re buying the business version, and then a lot of those limitations disappear.)
“Dropbox does not save version history for folders, including application bundles.” And guess what, Bob? When I go to the Dropbox app and look at a folder, “Version history” is not an option. It is if I select a file, though. I am not purchasing a Dropbox plan – I am using the basic free plan, which is the same plan many of the users here on the forums are using.
Dropbox documentation also tells you that when you a file’s version, it overwrites the file in place. This is, in fact, exactly what happens on the base level of Dropbox. If I roll a file (and I can only roll a file at a time) back to a past version, it overwrites the file in place. Instead of giving me a true point-in-time copy and then giving me the option of overwriting or restoring to an alternate location, I have to manage all of that myself.
Basic level lowest common denominator Dropbox IS NOT A BACKUP SOLUTION. If you’re paying extra money to get the additional features that allow it to kinda be used that way, be so kind as to make it clear that’s what you’re doing so you aren’t misleading users on this forum and setting them up for data loss.
I have the Dropbox plus plan, and the versioning only cover the last 30 days. So it’s not really a backup that way either, but more of a “shit I made a misstake and saved changes I meant not to” which means I am aware I made a misstake and know that the version from 2-3 days ago doesn’t have those changes so I can roll back. It’s more of an ’undo’ mechanism.
My experience parallels Lunk’s in this—Dropbox personal paid level, 30 days versioning, no folders or packages. When I had the free version, I had almost nothing.
Dropbox is an excellent sync service. I keep zipped backups elsewhere. And use Time Machine.
I have personally helped a significant number of users who have lost work because “I had it backed up to Dropbox,” except the change they made obliterated important data across all synchronized devices and they didn’t have Dropbox versioning with their free account.
Dropbox is a useful synchronization tool with some backup-oriented features. It is not adequate as a sole backup solution.
Claiming otherwise without significant caveats is both dangerous to users and likely to create more work for your friendly forum moderator. Making work for me can cause me to be grumpy enough to hit things with my big moderator hammer. (Yes, really. The relevant tools have a literal hammer icon.)
Okay, it’s not a backup solution for everyone. You win, all of you.
However …
In that sense, Windows machines are not a safe solution for most people. Scrivener isn’t a safe writing program for people who don’t know how to use it — in particular, not a safe environment for iOS users who don’t know how to defeat the idiosyncrasies of Dropbox. (And the rest of us too; do you remember iOS 13 at all?) I wonder how many of the same people can navigate Backblaze or setting up an NAS? A lot of them can’t find their zip backups, but I don’t say they’re not backups because of it.
In the last few months, I’ve had 2 clients who needed images. Neither were Windows issues, though, in general, particularly 10-20 years ago, I’d agree with you. While spinning drives generally give you lots of warning and fail slowly, SSDs sometimes just fricken stop completely and without any warning. So a client couldn’t boot, the BIOS did not see the drive. A new SSD and an image allowed complete restoration. In one instance it took about 30 minutes to restore the entire system, drivers, printers, scanners, all software etc. back to exactly as it had been 1 week before. The other was more difficult as we couldn’t get it to boot off a USB drive or DVD drive. (yes, I tried all the normal stuff). We had to restore the image on another computer and then replace the drive.
On yet another Dell Laptop, they used some bizarre SSD and it had a little over 10% life remaining after only 2 years! The image allowed us to replace the drive. Macrium offers free imaging software that can be scheduled for evenings while we sleep. Hard to understand why this isn’t a good option, but I don’t know about Macs.
Ditto for zip backups in Dropbox or any other service, and just to be clear, when in doubt, I’d always prefer a zip file over the backup of an uncompressed project.
I downloaded Backblaze (7 day trial), and four hours later, it’s almost done. If I edited a project in the middle of that process, would the Binder and contents match? (the carpet and drapes)
iCloud sync is a problem because synchronicity fails for the various parts of a project. How do we know Backblaze doesn’t have that problem? Has anyone tested to see? Have you tested all the restore options? How many times? What would it cost to test it a sufficient number of times to be sure? iCloud doesn’t fail every time, after all.
Saying “Dropbox is a backup” comes with caveats/caution, but if I can restore from it — and I have, many times — saying “synchronization is not backup” is a gross over-simplification.
If that happened to me, I’d use Time Machine … or I’d restore my files and reinstall software the hard way. I’m not sure the latter would be much harder than what your clients went through. It was hardly a silver bullet for you.
I really thought better of you. That’s not even middle school debate team-level argument skills; that’s just sour grapes at being called out on the details and assumptions you’re making that aren’t universal. You weren’t right about some details – that just makes you human like the rest of us, bro.
You have one particular twisty set of use cases that you’ve been able to cobble together to make Dropbox plus the rest of your workflow work like backups for you and that’s awesome. There’s no shame in admitting that you’re a power user and that what works for you is not universal for the rest of the users here.
Something like Backblaze is actually going to work a lot better for many users precisely because the interface is designed to interact backups in a more traditional way, just like Time Machine, or Windows Backup, or any of the other host of programs out there that take discrete point-in-time copies of data and treat them as backups. Which Dropbox can be cajoled to do (if you really know what you’re doing) but does not do easily. And if you already know how to do it, you already know the dangers involved…
Lowest common denominator here so everyone gets to keep their data, yes?
Backblaze isn’t doing anything unique that other backup programs don’t do. On Linux and MacOS, you don’t generally have volume-level snapshots without using exotic filesystem options, and the consumer version of Backblaze explicitly doesn’t try to support such technologies (even on Windows, where Volume Shadow Copy Service is largely ubiquitous in modern systems that use the NTFS filesystem.) But Backblaze is one vendor – if you don’t like it and don’t trust it, don’t use it. There are others. Backblaze, and other traditional backup programs, usually only have problems with files that have been opened exclusively for writing, and most of them (including Backblaze) will retry problem files until that exclusivity lock is gone and they can read it and process it. Backup programs treat your collection of files as data sets, not as individual files that will all be synchronized ASAP (like Dropbox and other sync engines do.)
Nobody is making the claim that Dropbox is not a backup solution because of the presence or lack of synchronicity, so that’s a strawman anyway. The synchronicity issue affects your ability to keep multiple copies of your data roughly in sync, and for a cloud backup program, that’s not the problem you’re trying to sove.
It’s not about whether I trust Backblaze or not … but you didn’t answer my question. Is Backblaze more reliable than iCloud for saving projects? Does anyone know?
Back to the facts, not opinion, I’ve restored hundreds of gigabytes from Dropbox, so I know it’s a backup. You’re touting a technical definition of “backup” at odds with the practical English meaning of it. This discussion doesn’t matter a whit either way, but I have an allergy to folks redefining words at random.
With that, I’ll apologize for being needlessly contentious and drop it.
Maybe this would be a better question for BackBlaze support?
The difference between a “backup” service and a “synchronization” service is right there in the name.
A backup is a static archive, preserving the state of the system on the backup date. If I want to have BackBlaze send me everything that was on my disk on January 1, 2019, I can. (Details dependent on your subscription.)
A synchronization service strives to give all connected devices current and identical copies of the synchronized documents. Versioning features, where they exist at all, are secondary to that goal. Details are again dependent on your subscription, but even the Dropbox Pro account only goes back 180 days.
Do you think Backblaze knows what their continuous backup does to an open Scrivener project? If we’re talking about a scheduled backup, that’s a different story, but Backblaze defaulted to continuous backup, and I don’t see a way to schedule it for a safer time. Their interface is sparse to the max! Backblaze is just an example, of course.
I have no reason to think continuous backup is significantly different from synchronization.
We’re talking about saving backups, which is a static copy of a project at a specific time, and not live open projects.
Is that where you get lost in the discussion?
I save my Scrivener backups in a folder that is synced to a cloud service, but the whole folder is also backed up using TimeMachine.
The OP asked specifically where we keep our backups, not where have our live active projects.
Keeping backups in a cloud synced folder means that I have copies of those backups on all my Macs and also on all their respective TimeMachines.
One of the most important differences between backup (continuous or not) and synchronization is that BackBlaze doesn’t come along and change your local copy because it thinks it’s out of date. Dropbox et. al. do that by design.
There IS no static copy of a project when the project is open. Where did you lose the thread? Backblaze is set for continuous backup at my machine, and I don’t see another option (though it may exist).
I also backup to Time Machine — and to another drive with ChronoSync. Dropbox is not my only backup, but it is a backup — particularly when it saves my my zip backups in Dropbox. I have those backups in the cloud and on 5 Macs in the house, and they’re easier to retrieve than in Time Machine.
Does BackBlaze (or another backup service) consider the entire project inaccessible if it’s open, hence it won’t make the same mistake iCloud has in the past? Does it respect the package structure in that way?