# DropBox, SkyDrive, etc. How secure against data loss?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dropbox-skydrive-etc-how-secure-against-data-loss/676621>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 18, 2013, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dropbox-skydrive-etc-how-secure-against-data-loss/676621 "2013-12-18T04:06:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![leahcim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b4bc9f/32.png) [@leahcim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leahcim)\
**Post date:** [December 19, 2013, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dropbox-skydrive-etc-how-secure-against-data-loss/676621/21 "2013-12-19T22:18:55Z")

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> [@control-z](#):
>
> A more likely bug scenario is temporary data loss until it is restored from backup, …

Note that the truly large-scale filesystems do not use the “live system + periodic backup” paradigm, but instead maintain multiple replicas of all data all the time on multiple drives, so if a drive fails there is no delay to switch to another replica.

I believe that dropbox is backed by Amazon’s S3, which is such a filesystem. Places like Amazon “eat their own dogfood” in the sense that [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) itself is hosted on the same tech as is offered in their cloud – they did a lot of work to make [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) reliable and durable, and then marketed the technology to do that to other companies. In that sense the tech is “proven” to the extent of [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com)’s stability.

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