Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files

Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by bitcartel on Friday October 26, 2012 @06:10PM (#4704506)

Doesn't Tarsnap store your data on their S3 account, rather than your own? If so, if how do you get your data back from Amazon if Tarsnap vanished tomorrow?

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by cperciva on Friday October 26, 2012 @08:20PM (#4704858)

Tarsnap isn't going to vanish tomorrow. It's steadily profitable so I don't need to worry about "runway".

Even if I get hit by lightning tomorrow, the service runs perfectly fine on its own for months at a time, so you'd have plenty of time to get your data back.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by bitcartel on Friday October 26, 2012 @08:58PM (#4704941)

How would people know if anything had happened to you and that they should begin to recover data - is there a dead man switch or notification procedure in place?

p.s. Please avoid golf courses this weekend!

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by blacksmythe on Friday October 26, 2012 @10:36PM (#4705141)

  >> is there a dead man switch or notification procedure in place?

The absence of weekly HN posts.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by cperciva on Saturday October 27, 2012 @06:02AM (#4705850)

is there a dead man switch or notification procedure in place?

There are people who should send out that notification if needed, yes.

p.s. Please avoid golf courses this weekend!

Don't worry, I don't play golf. :-)

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by underwater on Saturday October 27, 2012 @02:38AM (#4705582)

It would be worth formalizing your bus plan. I specifically chose a mainstream backup service over Tarsnap because you're running a one man shop.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by cperciva on Saturday October 27, 2012 @06:00AM (#4705847)

Thanks for the feedback -- yes, this is something I plan on doing (amidst all the other tasks I'm juggling...).

I very commonly hear why people are using Tarsnap, and from time to time I hear why people are no longer using Tarsnap, but I very rarely hear why people never started using Tarsnap, so I really appreciate you taking the time to comment.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by tripzilch on Monday October 29, 2012 @07:26AM (#4711797)

Please do! When I explained your service to a friend, this was the only "except for that ...", the only tar-snag, if you will.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by acabal on Friday October 26, 2012 @06:41PM (#4704599)

You can say that about any service--what if Crashplan's data center caught fire tomorrow? Tarsnap might be run by a single guy (I think?) but saying S3 is "more" or "less" reliable than any other private company isn't a great comparison. In any case a massive company like Amazon is the most likely to be reliable in these cases, I imagine.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by bitcartel on Friday October 26, 2012 @07:01PM (#4704652)

That's why I cobbled together a poor man's cloud RAID :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4689238

My earlier point was that I think data is stored on Colin Percival's S3 account (he is the creator of Tarsnap) and therefore you might lose access to the data (if he couldn't pay the bills or got hit by a bus) even though S3 itself is fine.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by ZoFreX on Friday October 26, 2012 @08:26PM (#4704876)

I use Arq to backup files on my MacBook - it saves them to my S3 bucket, so even if everyone working on Arq dies (I sincerely hope they don't!) and their servers all explode, my backups are still intact on S3 - which is less likely to go down permanently and lose all my files than Tarsnap (not that that is particularly likely either!).

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by Dylan16807 on Saturday October 27, 2012 @01:37AM (#4705469)

There are definitely tiers of reliability. An external drive drive is easily lost or damaged. A backup service can take individual drive/server losses but that might be the limit. S3 can lose an entire data center - the only real risk comes from software bugs.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by fusiongyro on Friday October 26, 2012 @06:39PM (#4704592)

This isn't really a concern for me, but I'd probably email Colin and ask for it. The tarsnap program is open-source, presumably if he stopped hosting it the server-side component could be replaced. The client does all the work.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by forensic on Friday October 26, 2012 @07:49PM (#4704766)

What if Colin is dead? It's a backup system for the truly paranoid so this is a legit question.

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Re:Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files by fusiongyro on Saturday October 27, 2012 @11:50PM (#4708094)

The truly paranoid use multiple backups. The encryption ensures that without the keys, nobody else could make use of the data anyway.

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