IceDrive lost thousands of my files without any notification. Their support escalated my ticket, then ghosted me for 2 weeks before closing it. I’m sharing a script to check if your files are actually backed up: https://github.com/rupumped/NicksAPPS/blob/main/Python/IceDriveVerification.py. Note that it requires argparse.
Usage: python IceDriveVerification.py C:\Documents C:\Photos C:\Projects --backup-root I:\
That’s tragic. Sorry about your loss and hope you can resolve it.
My tip for everyone would be if a cloud provider is offering lifetime plans to be very careful because that doesn’t indicate a sustainable model. Not saying it’s always a scam but it’s not a good sign.
I’ve never heard of IceDrive. What is it and what does it have to do with privacy? Explaining that would make your post more informative. I’ve been using Borg Backup and it’s been fine as far as I know. But yes, test your backups.
It’s a privacy-focused backup service.
I also have to ask how a privacy focused backup service can possibly lose any individual file. They really shouldn’t know how many files you have. They have to know much data you’re sending so they can charge you for the traffic and disk space, but they shouldn’t know whether it’s one giant file or a million small ones. It should just be a big lump of encrypted bits from their perspective.
The only privacy-focused service is self-hostable, libre, open source and, often, free. Investing in a local server and running something like a SMB or CIFS sync to a hard drive you own is the best next step. Servers aren’t expensive, either. You can use a £100 potato or reclaim an unwanted PC. The only factors you should spare no expense in are the drives and their storage. Next important is power supply. Well-known Asia-based brands only.
Once you’ve got hardware, the software is fairly simple. I use Linux running Samba on my local network with Foldersync on Android devices occasionally uploading, but there’s also Syncthing (which I haven’t tried), Nextcloud (which has a database system that can be a pain, but is one of the nicest and complete cloud programs and has apps for everything*) and more.
Oh. borgbase.com looked ok to me a while back, fwiw.
Never heard of them, and their site doesn’t leave me filled with confidence. They make a big deal about using a slower algorithm, call it zero trust, but also have a client that mounts your “drive” local seamlessly. In order to do that though your files need to be unencrypted before your OS can read them. So the client needs to be constantly encrypting and decrypting your files since it hypothetically has zero knowledge of your files at rest on their server.
I could see files getting scrambled/corrupted when it’s being uploaded and downloaded in rapid succession.
Edit - You also shouldn’t consider it a backup if you’re accessing the files constantly like Dropbox. You are essentially just paying for a mountable S3 drive, not a backup.
So they just closed your ticket without reason or resolution? No answer?
Yes. It automatically closed after two weeks of me waiting on a response after they said they’d escalated it.
Bummer. Did you open another ticket?
Yes.
The downside of using a lesser known cloud service, you take chances like this. I had never heard of ice drive previously.
Even with the popular ones, there’s a risk of unrecoverable loss. They don’t test your backups, so if there’s undetected corruption, they may not be restorable.
An untested backup is worth nothing.
With any cloud service or backup software you take a chance, especially if you don’t test your backups.
IceDrive isn’t unknown, but it is not well known. I think they’ve been in business for about 6 years. Backups are great, but not worth much if you don’t audit them occasionally. 3000 files is a lot OP. Sorry you are in that position. I find it hard to believe tho, that they do not have a complete backup of your files. I mean, 3,2,1 is about a basic of a backup system to impliment. I’d press them harder.
Is this a free account or paid?
Paid. I also found it hard to believe, which is why I checked the logs, tried working with their support staff, and wrote my own program to confirm.
That’s unfortunate.
Did you test restores before this and they were OK?
I definitely recommend having at least 2 backups, so you have 3 copies of your important data at all times.
That was my first time testing the backup. Good suggestion.
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My assumption on it is that the files wern’t synced to begin with. I looked the issue up on the site’s discussion area and it looks like it had a major sync issue a few years back where it wasn’t always syncing folders automatically and completly so files got left out.
Yeah, I did a cursory search and found quite a few complaints about lost data, data not synching, etc.
I don’t know if this is a case of bit rot, but just a heads-up OP: that script won’t detect this category of failure. You need a solution that computes checksums of the backed files to really be sure their content is integral.
I think your mistake was trusting someone else with your backups.
Even if you backup locally there can still be bugs or misconfiguration that causes data loss, just gotta test the backups.
what software do you use to accomplish your backups? how do you prefer testing them?
I use Restic for online and Synology active backup for local.
For restic I either restore the backup if I have the space, or if not just mount it and compare, and restore a portion of it.
For active backup since they are bootable images I restore to a VM and test.
and only relying on one medium for them.
