[cybmole]

I am trying to work thru a what-if & even with google help I am not finding a trustworthy explanation.

I keep my calibre library on C drive, & that library is daily copied to my dropbox folder, on the same C drive. ( I do also have a copy on another local drive but that's not part of the question)

occasionally , I make a system image of the whole C drive, so that I can recover from a hard drive failure

my what-if question is: what if the C drive fails or I decide to swap it out & rebuild from the system image. Clearly the system image will put back a much older version of my calibre library & will also put back an older version of my local dropbox folder.

I've been assuming that the cloud dropbox will still have the latest library copy and it will update any newly restored local version on the restored drive as soon as I go online ...
then I'd copy FROM local drop box to calibre library to get back to where i need to be ......BUT

..is that really what dropbox would do when PC goes online - will it realise that the (just restored) local files are actually older than it's cloud copies, or might it sync in the wrong direction? I know that dropbox claim to keep a 30 day backup of changes but I don't do system images that often.

The obvious answer is to rely not on drop box but on local external drives as my main backup, but I would like to know how dropbox handles the scenario of a C: drive being rebuilt from a system image ( which will rebuild the local dropbox folder and all of the local dropbox app data records )