Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
From their Web site FAQ:
"Dropbox saves a history of all deleted and previous versions of files for 30 days for all Dropbox accounts by default. If you have the Pack-Rat add-on, Dropbox saves those files for as long as you have the Pack-Rat add-on. With Pack-Rat, you never have to worry about losing an old version of a file."
Pack-Rat is a pro account feature. I'm not sure if it cost extra or not. I just checked pack rat is an additional $40 per year.
BOb
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That sounds like it refers to the single computer - single backup aspect of Dropbox. Each file is treated as a single object in normal circumstances. That's a perfect backup if only one computer is changing that file, or if all computers are in synch. However, in the multiple computer file conflict scenario (a "fork"), there is no defined correct backup for all computers - only for each single computer - and that's the scenario I was worrying about.
Ideally, one will manually resynch when a conflict is detected before things get out of hand (a process that requires some smarts and knowledge of the files Calibre uses in its library), but what does it do when multiple inconsistent files begin to build up on multiple computers as a result of a conflict? Is it possible to get each computer restored to its different state if one fails?
Does it mark conflicted file 1 (STATUS 1) as belonging to computer 1 and conflicted file 1 (STATUS 2) as belonging to computer 2, then keep 30 day backups of both, or what?
A related question is: "What do you see in Calibre during the conflict state?" Do you see your computer 2 metadata.db with all the books you added on computer 2 after the fork, or do you lose those and see only the files added on computer 1? To ask that a different way, I know that there will be a conflict file generated for metadata.db on computer 2. Is that file the computer 1 metadata.db or the computer 2 metadata.db?
Similarly, once the fork occurs, you begin to generate folders using calibre ids. They will be replicated from computer 2 to computer 1 (the folders have no conflict, as they are new on computer 2 and have no corresponding folder on computer 1). If you try to manually synchronize the two machines after the fork, you may be asking Calibre to generate folders that already exist, and that will fail. What happens when Calibre does that?
(I'm not trying to convince you, or anyone else, not to use dropbox - it's a great setup, provided its used wisely, and you remain sync'd, I'm just trying to figure out the limitations, risks and problems of using it.)