I have been asked to handle some issues around a Dropbox team folder that is about 80gigs in data 75,000 files on 9,000 folders that often has sync conflict issues, or situations where files get moved around and causes headaches for the team.
The main problem is that every once in a while, when a new device gets attached to the Dropbox folder, something happens where a copy of that folder gets created for reasons unknown. The last time this happened, I got a mass deletion alert from Dropbox which ended up being a situation where the Dropbox folder owner changed the location of the folder on his local hard drive and that operation appears to have synced the move operation, where the files disappeared and reappeared for the team.
Anyway, I think you get the idea.
I think I resolved by using the admin console to set "online-only mode" and "Don't sync automatically" as default for that team folder, to prevent deletion/moving of files. I also communicated to the team to start using the Dropbox Badge feature to minimize sync conflicts with files that are in use.
This got me thinking that I might want to do some file archiving to local backup where files that are before a certain date, could be moved into an archive folder that could be accessed by the team using another method. I was thinking this could reduce any overhead Dropbox might be experiencing due to the repository's size and amount of files.
Before I made this change, I used Macrium Reflect to back up the Account holder's system drive that contains his Dropbox folder (With Online-Only Set off), and Carbonite as an offsite back solution. But I'm thinking I need to have some other backup solution for the Dropbox folder now that files won't be synced automatically by default.
This person is a one man show that has a few employees so he doesn't want to add any locally managed devices to make this happen.
I'm wondering if anyone has encountered this before and what strategy have you used to:
- Make solid backups of Dropbox data that is set to online-only syncing
- Minimize syncing overhead by archiving
- or if you have another idea.
