Personal computing discussed
bigjohn888jb wrote:I had the bright idea of putting a client's Outlook pst file in dropbox, figuring that when Outlook was existed, that It would then sync up to the cloud and I'd have an offsite backup. Unfortunately I found out 3 months later that the file was having trouble syncing (5 GB's in size, has the paid version) and then something stopped trying to sync up and it synced down and overwrote the local PST file with the 3 month old copy. Usually I see in Dropbox that if there is a question of which file should be saved, that it makes a backup and you have two files. Not this time. I also had setup up a nightly image backup to a usb hard drive. The usb hard drive was removed, then plugged back in, but did not get the automatic drive letter, so the backup failed. I also setup another computer to get a freefilesync of all the data files including the pst file, but the computer shutdown and they did not notice. So I had what I thought was an offsite backup, usb backup, and another computer in the network backup that all failed. I would have noticed this if I were there more often, but they like to "save things up" for me, to maximize their visit from me. So the question revolves around any idea why Dropbox overwrite the local? Is the local maybe damaged and a scan might bring back the lost folders and contacts? Any ideas how to recover from this?
Usacomp2k3 wrote:I wouldn't try syncing such a big file, that is in active use. One of the downsides of PST's is a single e-mail will cause the entire file to need to be re-backed-up. So there is no incremental backup.
just brew it! wrote:Usacomp2k3 wrote:I wouldn't try syncing such a big file, that is in active use. One of the downsides of PST's is a single e-mail will cause the entire file to need to be re-backed-up. So there is no incremental backup.
Yup... and this is an absolute nightmare for network admins because lack of incrementals means PST backups take up huge amounts of space on the backup media.
bthylafh wrote:Surely a backup program that takes deltas would still work acceptably with PSTs. ISTR that DropBox is such a program.
w76 wrote:I don't actually know for certain how my own IT guy backs ours up, or if there even is one. We've migrated to some variant of Exchange that lives in MS's cloud, and as far as I can see, when I setup my e-mail on a new machine (an Office 365 Pro client, we are), the mailbox seems to stream from the cloud, not from inside our network.