How You Can Lose a File Despite Three Layers of Backup (and How To Avoid It)

ISO format that I learned about while working Sweden is what I’ve used ever since.
Name_20210929-1833_index.extension

Is it dangerous to use slashes in names? I assume it still is in some places since the slash separates folders/directories.

I use “2021.01.07-12.52.19” for photos or just “2021.01.07 etc” for some files. For readability I prefer the 29 Sept 2021 style and wish it sorted. I have a KM shortcut for the “dot date” I use it so often.

For years I named files “Some name.z” or worked my way back up the alphabet. Helped having the latest at the top of an alphabetic sort. I’m retired now so don’t often need that kind of versioning. Apple seems to have made “Save as” harder to use over the years, so they helped make me quit using that method. Auto-saving is much more robust than it used to be. But I haven’t read the article yet, so all of this may not apply.

I wouldn’t say “dangerous”, but yes, there are some limitations. Adobe products don’t work with them at all (at least the older versions I’m using). They’re stored on the actual file system as colons, so if you work with files in Terminal as well, they’ll show up as colons and you’ll have to use colons if you want to create files (or folders) that show up with slashes in them in the Finder (and Open/Save dialogs, etc.) And if you’re going to work cross platform, you’ll need to worry about limitations or restrictions on other OS’s. If those apply, yes, something like a period as a separator would be better. No separator would work as well, like in ISO formats, but I find those a bit harder to read. The key though, is using yyyy mm dd format to get sorting by date. Beyond that, the separator between the components is what works for you (and your team if working with others.)

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I used Dropbox for many years using their feature to retrieve older versions of a document. Even if this was limited to 30 days, I could find again documents deleted by error.

I had to stop using dropbox when my wife and I started sharing the iMac and created an account for each of us. I imagined it would work like Apple’s iCloud Drive shared folders work, but it did not. Once the Dropbox driver was installed for one user, it would produce an error message when the other user logged in. The Dropbox support offered a solution which implied using the macOS unix command line interface, but I am not unix savvy and I did not want to do things which might have had negative consequences for other parts of the system.

I’m horrified :slight_smile: but, yeah, YMMV!
–e.

I solved that one by upgrading to a 2 TB DropBox account and we both use it. After 45 years we have few secrets from each other and we just consider it the family DropBox…with his and hers folders inside it. We can see each other’s stuff but just ignore it for the most part. Anything I really wanted to keep secret would just get hidden in 1Password somewhere…she knows that password but would likely not find buried stuff…or in a secondary 1PW vault or an encrypted .dmg file…but I haven’t seen the need for that.

We have 50 GB of data combined, so 15€ per month is a bit much. We survived somehow until it was possible to use Apple’s iCloud family sharing, which comes at 3€ per month for 200 GB while still surpassing our needs. Dropbox’s price may be lower per GB, but as for now we do not need 2000 GB. Since we are both 70, it does not look like we will ever need so much volume space.

Yes, indeed. I was a VAX/VMS Internals guru for years. VMS added ‘;nnnnn’ to a maximum of 65,536 (or 2^16) every time you saved a file. You could run out of numbers if you wrote a recursive CLD script with a bug in it. VMS is the most stable long-running enterprise operating system ever built. Microsoft lost a lot of money when they stole code from it. Windows on the ALPHA chip was the penalty, which only help kill off VMS faster.

VMS is sort-of still available on Intel, but the interrupt stack is too short to really work well. I even gave up supporting the code I published for VMS.

PDP-11 was pretty good, too. It holds the world record for the longest running computer without a reboot. It does one job, that wasn’t worth the effort to replace. By now I hope it has been replace because of the heat budget alone, but I think the thing is still working.

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One model of the PDP-11, the PDP-11/35, had core memory, which retained everything even after cycling power. Our system would resume after a power outage doing exactly what it was doing when the power went out!

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Slashes are fine if you’re not using cloud storage. But if you are using cloud storage, you might want to avoid slashes. Some cloud services are tolerant of slashes and Dropbox is one of them. But One Drive, for example will refuse to sync when it encounters slashes (and quite a list of other characters, too).

Makes sense to me. OneDrive (and its big brother, SharePoint) are designed so you can mount the remote volumes on a Windows desktop. As such, they prohibit all of the filename characters that a Windows desktop system prohbits:

Not mentioned in this thread is the versioning feature used by many Apple products to revert to previous versions, e.g. in TextEdit see File > Revert To. This gives a Time Machine-like interface to scroll through and revert to past versions. Not sure if this feature is incorporated into any non-Apple product.

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Even more potential for file sorting disasters: Windows and Excel etc.

I have shared many sorted files with Windows users which apparently sorts alphabetically, so that messed up the file order I used, especially when we processed file lists in Excel or other programs which may sort again differently.

And most of the Office apps will give you grief with slashes as well. I am fighting a losing battle with people in the office about that-I send out the email about what not to put in a filename and still find recently created files with all those reserved (aka prohibited) characters in them.

Thanks very much the tip about file numbering followed by punctuation - all these year’s I’ve been putting in leading zeros to order files in list when I didn’t have to.
Regarding Dropbox - the Dropbox subreddit on Reddit has lots and lots of stories about accounts being abruptly disabled without notice, years worth of files lost with no way to recover, no way to appeal, no communication with DB. etc.
Will start looking at alternatives soon.

I’ve always started everything by making a copy of the base-start file, unless, as in imaging, the base file remains unaltered. So… that’s good practice.

What I may suggest though and which you perhaps haven’t thought of, is that e.g. Pages, makes a ‘version’ every time you hit ‘Save’. It keeps these versions organised for you, in exactly the same way that Time Machine does and as you might discover, the UI is essentially Time Machine too, allowing you to easily move back through time.

There is an app called ForeverSave that lets you save documents automatically at a specified interval. Unfortunately, it has not been updated since December of 2016 although it still “seems to” work in Monterey public beta.

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Not sure if this feature is incorporated into any non-Apple product

Document versions are standard for any document-based Mac application. A new version is created each time you manually save a document.

That would be great, but, for example, I don’t see Microsoft Word doing this. Or is it hidden somewhere? I was wondering if any 3rd party vendor had implemented the feature.