If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice

Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by cfallin on Sunday February 22, 2015 @01:54PM (#9090479)

As a slight enhancement on pure text files: Org-mode [1] for Emacs! I really only use the outlining, and sometimes the TODO-item support, but having nice navigation/subtree folding on top of a file that's still plain text is really great.

I have a few three-line scripts in my ~/bin that commit my Org files to a git repo and push to my remote server, or pull changes. Lets me have copies on multiple machines and works really well.

[1] http://orgmode.org/

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by graeme on Sunday February 22, 2015 @01:50PM (#9090462)

I do this. What happens if Dropbox deletes a file though, on the server? Then it would vanish from the computer as well. If it was an important but rarely checked file, you might not notice for months or years, by which time it might be difficult to retrieve a copy.

Does anyone have more info on the likelihood of this + the possible ways to solve it if it happens? It occurred to me that most of my important files are potentially deletable via Dropbox.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by fencepost on Sunday February 22, 2015 @02:30PM (#9090644)

Dropbox is not a backup. Dropbox is a file sync service with some limited backup features. AFAIK it also hasn't actually ever reported profits, but it's well enough backed and dominant enough that it's unlikely to disappear.

What should happen in the case of missing a file deletion until beyond Dropbox's 30-day versioning windows is that you retrieve the file from your automated backups of at least one of the computers that Dropbox is syncing to.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by halfcat on Sunday February 22, 2015 @08:44PM (#9092123)

>Dropbox is not a backup. Dropbox is a file sync service with some limited backup features

Agreed. Dropbox is more of a consumer disaster recovery solution than a backup solution. If your computer hard drive dies, you lose zero data. On the sysadmin side of IT, we distinguish between backups and replication. Backups have retention and are usually slow to recover from if you need to recover large amounts of data. Replication is often used to maintain a "ready to go" copy of the data. If a server dies a horrible death, boot the standy replication partner and we are back online. Dropbox can work this way of you have it installed on two PCs.

If your data is important, don't leave it to any single service to protect it. If you have truly important data, go ahead and use online backup/sync services, but also make your own point-in-time backups to avoid the accidental deletion of a file you only look at once per year. A cheap USB hard drive that holds monthly or quarterly backups, kept in a safe deposit box, will suffice for most people as that third line of defense.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by graeme on Sunday February 22, 2015 @03:30PM (#9090924)

>What should happen in the case of missing a file deletion until beyond Dropbox's 30-day versioning windows is that you retrieve the file from your automated backups of at least one of the computers that Dropbox is syncing to.

What would you use for these automatic backups? I use backblaze for my whole computer. However, I think they also only keep file changes for 30 days past change date.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by bigiain on Sunday February 22, 2015 @05:53PM (#9091595)

I use TimeMachine and three large harddrives - a pair in raid1 that TimeMachine does it's normal thing with, then another drive that powers up once a week and rsyncs off that raid pair.

If I were _properly_ paranoid, I'd also set up an off-site backup drive - perhaps using TahoeLAFS. I figure the chance of Dropbox losing my data at the same time as I lose three bits of electronics at my house is pretty small.

For non OSX users, you can fairly trivially roll-your-own TimeMachine-like snapshot backup process in Linux using rsync, cron, and a little bash - it's not like Apple invented it... It might even be just as simple using Powertools on Windows.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by zyxley on Sunday February 22, 2015 @03:56PM (#9091045)

I use Crashplan, which is a little slower and clunkier than other services but keeps infinite versions of files, including deleted files (unlike Backblaze).

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by graeme on Sunday February 22, 2015 @05:34PM (#9091518)

I could try Crashplan again. When I attempted it before, it never successfully synced, despite hours spent emailing system reports back and forth with their support reps.

I would pay Backblaze double if they kept past versions.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by NeutronBoy on Sunday February 22, 2015 @06:18PM (#9091685)

Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com) is great and easy to configure, if you can deal with not having a GUI.

Colin Percival (the guy who maintains it) is also amazing with support - he was responding to my emails on Christmas day!

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by serf on Sunday February 22, 2015 @08:18PM (#9092052)

I like SpiderOak.

Every platform i've tried it on has worked okay.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by StavrosK on Sunday February 22, 2015 @08:29PM (#9092083)

It worked fine for me until I got more data than my plan supported. It was screwed after that, I deleted some stuff I didn't need, but it had already gotten into a borked state and support couldn't even help me fix it.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by winter_blue on Sunday February 22, 2015 @02:13PM (#9090561)

They wouldn't delete your file randomly for no reason, unless for a bug. But user data is top priority at Dropbox (it's what their business is all about), so you're extremely unlikely to loose it. They most likely have lots of redundancy.

Now if you accidentally delete something and want to recover it, you have 30 days to do so with a free account. With a paid account, your history is kept forever (basically files are never deleted).

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by richchetwynd on Sunday February 22, 2015 @02:44PM (#9090699)

You can always backup both your Dropbox and Evernote to a single place. I'm the founder of https://revert.io and that's exactly what we've built our service to do. Love any feedback if you want to try it out. Thanks!

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by 8bitpony on Saturday February 28, 2015 @06:51AM (#9123446)

This looks great, I've signed up.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by CamperBob2 on Sunday February 22, 2015 @02:26PM (#9090628)

It's best if you don't think of Dropbox as a backup service. People treat it that way (and I'm guilty of it too) but a file-sync provider is really a very different thing at heart.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by hobarrera on Sunday February 22, 2015 @04:38PM (#9091241)

If you're so scared that your files are so easily deleteable, why don't you keep backups?

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by graeme on Sunday February 22, 2015 @05:31PM (#9091505)

I do, but if Dropbox deleted a file, it would be deleted off the synced backup too, unless I get something with infinite version history.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by hobarrera on Saturday March 07, 2015 @10:57PM (#9164461)

So you keep your files and your backups in dropbox?

Rule 1 of backups is "don't keep your files and your backups in the same place". Pretty much common sense.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by k-mcgrady on Sunday February 22, 2015 @06:12PM (#9091660)

Why would you sync the backup? Just backup the contents of your Dropbox folder to a hard drive every night. Then it's on the hard drive and Dropbox can't access it.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by walterbell on Sunday February 22, 2015 @06:28PM (#9091721)

Incremental backups or deduplicating storage (ZFS)?

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by gcr on Sunday February 22, 2015 @03:06PM (#9090809)

On new accounts, Dropbox only allows a paid upgrade to store one year of file history.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by chengiz on Sunday February 22, 2015 @02:14PM (#9090572)

Exactly. Evernote and its clones seem to give you the best of both worlds in one product but in practice they do a half assed job of both. It's sort of like the windows vs unix mentality of having one behemoth do everything vs chaining independent tasks together. When I hit save and dropbox just syncs in the background, that's pretty much the best use of my time and also IMO the simplest solution to the problem.

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Re:If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice by CatMtKing on Sunday February 22, 2015 @03:09PM (#9090826)

Funny story I have with Dropbox:

I was setting up my new desktop to dual boot Debian and Windows. In the interest of saving space, I tried to have Dropbox in both systems target the same directory to sync. I'm not precisely sure what happened - I think the folder hadn't finished pulling in all the files before I logged out - but it somehow trashed everything in my lab's shared directory. Thank god for their API and their automatic file versioning, or I would never have gotten out of that pickle.

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