Cloud Backup Failures

This is bad but it also looks like you didnt have a proper backup strategy. Their service looks like a versioning/syncing service but not a backup service.

Looks like it's preserving them now (for newly backed up). I guess I was unlucky.

You didn't lose your data!I've been dealing with backups a fair bit recently, using Obnam over SSH. It starts to induce paranoia at a certain point, with concerns over your safest backup drive failing, so you save to a third and so on... it's hard drives all the way down.They usually say Dropbox etc. isn't a backup solution, but I suppose it would have saved you here if it didn't sync from elsewhere.Finally, use a friend to proofread next time - I'm a lingu

Did he try Dropbox support to see if they have a backup?

that's brave! i don't want any margin of error for my backups.what happens if all your files get deleted from your computer and then they're deleted from your trash can in the same instance?

How's that? I've restored lots of files and had no issues.

I take it you've never had a failed backup restore?

Tried to use backblaze to save personal files on a laptop I was going to lose access to, at first it said it was incorrectly permissioned. I changed a few setting and the message went away. My fun surprise when I went to restore from the backup and 90% of my files were missing and my former computer was bricked.

Something similar happened to me once. I still don't know what exactly happened, but in Dropbox some files were deleted, I still had my local copy, but then Dropbox synced the file deletions and I didn't notice. Only when it was too late did I notice that files were gone and their support was unable to help. I think I managed to recover some files with one of the NTFS "undelete" tools, but that was probably the day I started to treat "the cloud" differently. Nowaday

Hope you had timemachine on which allowed you to instantly recover the contents?