Avoiding data loss

People suffering data loss because of misconfiguration, misunderstanding or hardware oddities are a recurring, if infrequent, feature here and on the issue tracker. For some of us we’re wise to things going wrong and/or dropping databases when we were young and foolish (listen, it was only a single site’s entire accounts data, OK? they had five other sites), but it’s not really right for us to say “you should have a backup” and wish them luck.

What do folk think of a first-time, very brief prompt that succinctly warns people about the possibility of data loss? Would it have helped previous victims, and prevent some future ones? Would the minor, one-off irritation be worth it? Should it force people to type “YES OK I GET IT I PROMISE I HAVE BACKUP” before being able to use syncthing?

If you’ve been a victim - or nearly been a victim - would this have saved your data?

I imagine it being a config directive which experienced users could just set to “true” when we generate our configurations, because we definitely have backups already. We definitely test them and know they work. Definitely.

3 Likes

My younger self would have just clicked yes, ignoring everything. My older self actually has backups and would also click yes.

“Why should I test my backups? They’ve never worked to begin with…”

4 Likes

Perhaps a link to “read more” about effective backup and/or some pitfalls of running Syncthing without a backup? I suspect its partly a failure of imagination in first-time users – “its just copying files between two computers, how can it possibly hose all my files… oh no!”

Someone should write/do something…