System Rebuild - data from Dropbox or backup?
Posted: 28 Oct 2019 21:08
I am in the process of rebuilding my PC. Unlike previous occasions when I had an old and a new machine, this time there's only the one. My last back-up was about 3 or 4d before the PC went down the tubes. I have Dropbox Plus running continuously.
The question was whether to load the data files from the back-up then sync with Dropbox to get the last 3/4d down, or just allow Dropbox to sync everything onto a rebuilt, empty PC ("everything" and "empty" is in the context of my user data in C:\DATA).
I made an initial stab at restoring the back-up of one of my local users - the data in C:\USERS\ADRIAN. This was not a happy experience - firstly I had no idea how much data there is in the Windows profiles for one user. Secondly, the permissions were all to pot because the "ADRIAN" before and the "ADRIAN" now are different, of course.
But more to the point, I got seriously worried by the dates on the restored files because the "created" date was the restore date. This disturbed me because if I went on to restore C:\DATA from back-up and then synched to Dropbox, it suggested to me that when Dropbox looked at the files modified in the last 3/4d after the back-up, and tried to decide which was the latest version, it would look at the "created" date and decide that the ones on my PC (from the back-up) were the latest version and so send the back-up versions up to the Dropbox server, "over-writing" the Dropbox versions with the (in reality) earlier versions from the back-up.
As a result, and failing to find much more detail in Google, I went for no restoration from back-up and just synching everything down from Dropbox. It is a long job!
Does anyone have any insight as to whether I was worrying unnecessarily, given that there are at least 3 dates associated with each file in Windows - Created, Modified and Accessed? (I really didn't expect to see Created being years later than Modified!) Could I have gone for loading the files from the back-up and then synching with Dropbox to get the last 3/4d??? Thanks for any comments - too late for this time but maybe for next...
The question was whether to load the data files from the back-up then sync with Dropbox to get the last 3/4d down, or just allow Dropbox to sync everything onto a rebuilt, empty PC ("everything" and "empty" is in the context of my user data in C:\DATA).
I made an initial stab at restoring the back-up of one of my local users - the data in C:\USERS\ADRIAN. This was not a happy experience - firstly I had no idea how much data there is in the Windows profiles for one user. Secondly, the permissions were all to pot because the "ADRIAN" before and the "ADRIAN" now are different, of course.
But more to the point, I got seriously worried by the dates on the restored files because the "created" date was the restore date. This disturbed me because if I went on to restore C:\DATA from back-up and then synched to Dropbox, it suggested to me that when Dropbox looked at the files modified in the last 3/4d after the back-up, and tried to decide which was the latest version, it would look at the "created" date and decide that the ones on my PC (from the back-up) were the latest version and so send the back-up versions up to the Dropbox server, "over-writing" the Dropbox versions with the (in reality) earlier versions from the back-up.
As a result, and failing to find much more detail in Google, I went for no restoration from back-up and just synching everything down from Dropbox. It is a long job!
Does anyone have any insight as to whether I was worrying unnecessarily, given that there are at least 3 dates associated with each file in Windows - Created, Modified and Accessed? (I really didn't expect to see Created being years later than Modified!) Could I have gone for loading the files from the back-up and then synching with Dropbox to get the last 3/4d??? Thanks for any comments - too late for this time but maybe for next...