I couldn’t find any information on this. Since I turned on backups I’m wondering if Dynalist will just keep adding new backups forever, till my Dropbox account is full, or will it automatically delete older backups after X number of backups are made?
We don’t automatically delete backups, and we’ll add one per day.
Is it getting too large for you? It’s all text files so we thought it’s fine, plus we don’t want to assume that old backups are not important, since you might have old information that got deleted later so it can only be found in the old backups.
Even if we made a “only keep the last 180 backups”, I think we’ll make it an option to opt-in rather than making it the default.
My file is only at 290 mB for all my backups, but I also run the dropbox 1 TB plan so backup size is irrelevant for me at least
I just started using pro so I have no idea how much space these will eventually take up, but I object to automated processes that continually add files to a folder one tends to forget about without any controls whatsoever. If you want people to be using Dynalist pro for years on end and want them to create lots of files - eventually these files will take up a substantial amount of space. Having some kind of limit seems to make sense to me, even if it is a very large one.
Dynalist has a feature in the works called history revision
It pretty much solves the issue of version control of things you do before automated daily backups hit
2 zip files are made per day from dynalist automated importer, but you could always dump those later in another folder down the road
Personally I like the way dynalist backup is right now. Its straight forward for me to recover data since its all very well organized.
Also, my 290mB size on all my backups is over an 8-9month period, and I duplicated docs multiple times so in reality my file size should be around ~100 mB or less right now
You’ll be really hard pressed to hit 200 mB file size backup in a year though. That’s just pure text almost as well.
In 5 years that would be 1 GB tops, which is still very small for backup sizes
backups are only in text and OPML format (images are stored on dynalist’s server)
1 GB or even 500 MB might be “small for backup sizes” but it doesn’t really matter if someone is suddenly maxed out on their free Dropbox account and doesn’t know why.
Every developer these days is saying: my app only takes x amount of space and only costs x amount of money, that isn’t much… but every end user is using dozens of apps from dozens of developers that all say the same thing. These things add up…
Not sure if you’ve read my comment above in full, I’m not opposed to adding this option, but I think it should be opt-in rather than the default. Do you mean it should be the default behavior?
@Kerim I would say that the whole point of having these backups is so that one day, you might need something that you’ve deleted from Dynalist a long time ago, or you can no longer find in Dynalist, you can go back in time to find it. It would be very unfortunate if were to need something that have been cleaned up from the backup files.
At this point, there’s no guarantee (yet) that we’ll keep all version history on our server forever, so I think that’s one of the reasons why people sign up for daily backups.
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Let me put it this way. I’m not a programmer, but I’m the kind of person who checks if my backups actually work, who knows how to run scripts on my computer (I use Hazel on the Mac for this) to clean out files from folders that tend to get filled up over time, etc. Personally, I don’t really need daily backups for more than a month. I will probably try to figure out a Hazel script to keep only one backup per month for anything older than that… And even with such habits, I recently had a VPS I run shut down because I didn’t know I needed to run a CRON job to clean up old log files. None of these were very big, but over time they accumulated enough to shut down a website that serves about eight thousand unique visitors a day… It took me an entire day to figure out what happened and to learn how to fix the problem.
I am also the kind of person who helps my older family members, friends, colleagues, and students who are less tech savvy with their computer problems. I’ve seen my own mother get frustrated and blame herself when her files stopped syncing to Dropbox even though it was the result of an unchecked process similar to this one. For me the question is whether Dynalist only wants users like me, or also wants users like my mother? At the very least a user like my mother should be alerted to the fact that by choosing to backup her files she is responsible for keeping an eye on how much storage she’s using… better would be to have a cap (as suggested) - either as the default or at least as an option.
To answer your question, I think we welcome both types of users.
We do get errors from Dropbox when a user’s Dropbox is full, so maybe at least we can send out an email to remind the user and present the user with the option to automatically delete old backups (not implemented but was mentioned in this thread).
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So now, less than a year later. my backup folder is 1.24 GB. That is a lot, especially since I’m on a free plan with Dropbox. Personally I would prefer to have it just keep one backup per month for backups older than 1 month… [After doing this manually the folder is just 215 MB.]
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I think this will be a nice feature to have some kind of time frame for backup (you should really submit as feature request), but I also think most “less tech savvy” people don’t know cloud backup is in the first place. In the meantime Google offer 15GB of free space for every account, if it really bother you that much you can just create one especially for backup purpose (instead using your Dropbox space).
Is there any update on this? are you planning a 180 day delete cycle Erika?
Thanks
Any update on this yet?
There’s no delete cycle - you get infinite daily backups on dropbox or google drive and will need to log in and delete old ones if you desire.
Both services send you nag emails long before you hit your limit.
My backups go back to 2020 and are under 0.1 GB total.
If you want more space it’s $2 / mo for 100GB of space.