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dropbox backup question

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susanL

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classic cc 7.3.1
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I am storing my photos on an external drive, though my lightroom catalog is on my macbook pro laptop. I ran into difficulties trying to back up the external drive using time machine (trying to include it with my full backup), so I thought i would try a different strategy. I looked at dropbox, and considered crashplan. it seemed that dropbox would be somewhat simpler and less intrusive, but it appears that I misunderstood what "sync" means. I copied my "2018" folder that is on the external drive to dropbox, but when I download more photos, or delete as I sort, on the external drive, I had expected that to "sync" on Dropbox. That does not seem to be the case. Has anyone tried this approach and found a solution? Or did I just make the wrong choice? thanks!
 
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You need to include (i.e. unexclude) the external volume in your TimeMachine to get TimeMachine to recognize the volume. You Back Up volume needs to be a different EHD and large enough to include both the primary volume and the EHD with the photos. By default all external volumes are excluded in Time Machine. You can change this in Options
 
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susanL said:
I am storing my photos on an external drive, though my lightroom catalog is on my macbook pro laptop. I ran into difficulties trying to back up the external drive using time machine (trying to include it with my full backup), so I thought i would try a different strategy. I looked at dropbox, and considered crashplan. it seemed that dropbox would be somewhat simpler and less intrusive, but it appears that I misunderstood what "sync" means. I copied my "2018" folder that is on the external drive to dropbox, but when I download more photos, or delete as I sort, on the external drive, I had expected that to "sync" on Dropbox. That does not seem to be the case. Has anyone tried this approach and found a solution? Or did I just make the wrong choice? thanks!
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Dropbox syncs a folder with the same name, that is located on your internal drive in the root of your user folder. Anything inside that folder is synced. Copying another folder manually to the Dropbox servers won’t sync it, as you noticed.
 
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If you delete something from your dropbox folder on your desktop/laptop it is deleted on the cloud version ….. so it is not a backup. You may only notice the problem months after the problem has occurred.
 
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I did try to initially Include the external drive in the time machine backup, but something happened and the external TM drive was fried. Since I just purchased a new drive to replace it, and am about to travel and really need to make sure nothing happens, at the moment I don't want to try that again.

but... now i see what i did wrong - i copied the folder with photos instead of uploading it - thank you for pointing me in the right direction! i'll give the time machine approach another try when i return to home base.
 
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and a follow-up. although i successfully uploaded all the photos to drop box (only one month) in about 5 hours (!), a bit of research showed that if i shut down and then later turn on the laptop without the external drive attached, dropbox will think that everything is deleted - and proceed to delete my hard drive folder the next time i attach it, unless i always remembered to do certain things. so this was not the solution, i canceled and got my refund. now to find something else...
 
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