- Joined
- Sep 23, 2014
- Messages
- 180
- Location
- Leander, TX USA
- Lightroom Experience
- Intermediate
- Lightroom Version
- Lightroom Version Number
- Lightroom Classic version: 11.3.1 [ 202204181225-f90ebff5 ]
- Operating System
- macOS 12 Monterey
I'd like to update the folks here on my Dropbox experience on a Mac.
I had all of my raw images in Dropbox with LR pointing to them. I also had a external disk that the images originally came from as well as a backup of that disk. I changed my process so that I would push a few key files such as the previews to Dropbox and then sync (using rsync) from the Dropbox area to my backup disk. This was working fine for a few months. Then I got an email from Dropbox warning that applications might not work correctly after Apple pushed out an update which occurred at update 12.3.
After 12.3 came out, things appeared to be fine. LR seemed happy. I then ran my script to push things to Dropbox -- that went fine. And then sync the Dropbox copy to my external hard drive. That's when things went awry. After the 12.3 update, the files in the Dropbox area appeared to have zero length. This was true using `ls` from the command line as well as looking at files via the Finder. rsync got confused and zapped all the files on the external hard drive to be zero length. I managed to stop it before it completely finished but there was already 14,000 files that had been zeroed out. Yes... they were still in the Dropbox cloud (as well as my second backup drive) but it upset me pretty bad.
I had already begun the process of moving to BackBlaze B2 because I can not figure out Dropbox's pricing schedule. They have 2TB and they sorta kinda have 3TB but then things get weird and you have to sign up with a different type of account to get above the 3TB limit. At least, that is my interpretation. There are many threads about the topic on the Dropbox community forum. BackBlaze has a pricing structure that is transparent. Also in the works already was me purchasing a large NAS. I have about 100 old disk drives from 6G up to 4TB of backups and random junk that I've collected over my 60+ years. I wanted to dump all of those on one big NAS and the go through and find the useful stuff and delete the other stuff.
The NAS arrived. I asked it to pull down all of my Dropbox data -- which it was happy to. I copied it to another directory on the NAS and ask the NAS to pump it back up to BackBlaze -- which it is still in the process of doing. Meanwhile, I mounted the new area via SMB, pointed LR to the new area, and then asked LR if there were any missing photos. It reported back that there are no missing photos (see attached).
As a test, I imported about 163 images from a Canon R5. Each one about 40MB. The import took about 15 minutes via WiFi. I'm hoping I can figure out some way to have a local cache so I can import at native disk speeds and then bleed the images over to the NAS or to BackBlaze as bandwidth permits. This will be especially important when I start traveling but I know those problems can be solved one way or another. There are things to explore like rclone, FUSE, and UnionFS which I've not done yet.
I've not entirely stopped drinking the Dropbox Kool-Aid but I hope to be completely off of it soon.
To be clear and fair, Dropbox didn't lose any data but it's current implementation on the Mac scares me. That plus the non-obvious pricing structure is why I'm leaving it.
I had all of my raw images in Dropbox with LR pointing to them. I also had a external disk that the images originally came from as well as a backup of that disk. I changed my process so that I would push a few key files such as the previews to Dropbox and then sync (using rsync) from the Dropbox area to my backup disk. This was working fine for a few months. Then I got an email from Dropbox warning that applications might not work correctly after Apple pushed out an update which occurred at update 12.3.
After 12.3 came out, things appeared to be fine. LR seemed happy. I then ran my script to push things to Dropbox -- that went fine. And then sync the Dropbox copy to my external hard drive. That's when things went awry. After the 12.3 update, the files in the Dropbox area appeared to have zero length. This was true using `ls` from the command line as well as looking at files via the Finder. rsync got confused and zapped all the files on the external hard drive to be zero length. I managed to stop it before it completely finished but there was already 14,000 files that had been zeroed out. Yes... they were still in the Dropbox cloud (as well as my second backup drive) but it upset me pretty bad.
I had already begun the process of moving to BackBlaze B2 because I can not figure out Dropbox's pricing schedule. They have 2TB and they sorta kinda have 3TB but then things get weird and you have to sign up with a different type of account to get above the 3TB limit. At least, that is my interpretation. There are many threads about the topic on the Dropbox community forum. BackBlaze has a pricing structure that is transparent. Also in the works already was me purchasing a large NAS. I have about 100 old disk drives from 6G up to 4TB of backups and random junk that I've collected over my 60+ years. I wanted to dump all of those on one big NAS and the go through and find the useful stuff and delete the other stuff.
The NAS arrived. I asked it to pull down all of my Dropbox data -- which it was happy to. I copied it to another directory on the NAS and ask the NAS to pump it back up to BackBlaze -- which it is still in the process of doing. Meanwhile, I mounted the new area via SMB, pointed LR to the new area, and then asked LR if there were any missing photos. It reported back that there are no missing photos (see attached).
As a test, I imported about 163 images from a Canon R5. Each one about 40MB. The import took about 15 minutes via WiFi. I'm hoping I can figure out some way to have a local cache so I can import at native disk speeds and then bleed the images over to the NAS or to BackBlaze as bandwidth permits. This will be especially important when I start traveling but I know those problems can be solved one way or another. There are things to explore like rclone, FUSE, and UnionFS which I've not done yet.
I've not entirely stopped drinking the Dropbox Kool-Aid but I hope to be completely off of it soon.
To be clear and fair, Dropbox didn't lose any data but it's current implementation on the Mac scares me. That plus the non-obvious pricing structure is why I'm leaving it.