The final frontier

I have just nominated myself for the October 2023 Bonehead move of the year award. I should have know better BUT, as all know, that cliché from Star Trek (I think) was something like Space; the final frontier. When I was working, there was a take on that saying ... Human error, the final determinant. We can program machinery all we want BUT there is nothing preventing gringo estupidio from doing just that.

During the bridge game I ran yesterday, I notice one of the files I use to transform the username one uses, on the web site where we play, to a full name (e.g., abbeyrhode to Michael Abbey) was not up-to-date. I use Dropbox for all my documents, downloads, and a lot more. This whenever I need a file, I can be sure that its contents are the same no matter where I access it from. 

The best fix I know for sync issues with Dropbox is to unregister the problematic computer's Dropbox, thereby wiping any local copy of files in the cloud. Then I turn sync off and back on, thereby requesting a full resync of my local files. Here's where estupidio gringo takes over. I grabbed the local copy of the files and threw them in the trash can on my Acer laptop. About 20 minutes later, I went to Dropbox on their web site and lo and behold, there was nothing there.

What I should have done, but it was now too late, was follow the events as outlined in the previous paragraph highlighted in red. So I have just lost copies of:

• Over 25,000 digitized photos
• Over 300 self-made MP3 files I use to study Spanish
• The complete contents of My Documents and the Crap folders

All in all, probably north of 90Gb of precious files. It's not like I could EVER get them back ... and here is the big factor:

ℌ𝔬𝔴𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔯, ℑ 𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔫𝔢𝔡 𝔬𝔲𝔱 𝔱𝔬 𝔟𝔢 𝔫𝔬𝔱 𝔞𝔰 𝔰𝔱𝔲𝔭𝔦𝔡 𝔞𝔰 ℑ 𝔠𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔡 𝔟𝔢 ...

My high tech background is littered with, in my opinion, the single most important word that, when one prescribes to what it suggests, recovering from this bonehead move was time consuming, but not impossible ... the envelope please ... that word is:

B  a  c  k  u  p  s

So this is what I have been doing to undo the disaster ...

1. Ensuring local sync is off for my Mac and Acer
2. Systematically restore my 25,000+ photos from the cloud to a local folder
3. Using the Dropbox web interface
• Upload a handful of the recovered folders to Dropbox
• Inspect the results, looking for bottlenecks like files that could not be uploaded (Dropbox tells you about there files but does not f&*#$%^g tell you why!)
• Are we done yet?
• If so, carry on to step 4
• If not, return to step 2
4. Repeat until satisfied what some idiot deleted from Dropbox is back

The size of some of the folders I am uploading is over 2Gb and some contain 1,000+ files so the uploads I let run unattended. Oh ya, by the way, about 4pm yesterday I kicked off a restore to my thousands of photos (from backups) and that job ran until around 5am.

Now I believe, based on what I have written so far, I am not in this boat completely (maybe 20%) ...