Some weeks back, my backups stopped working. I was using Dropbox, and Dropbox was doing some biiiig upgrade. One side effect of this upgrade was that Dropbox stopped watching the folder it had been watching and started watching some random other folder. I didn't really notice this. Yay, I didn't need to restore from backups in all that time. I changed my backup system so that it used the new folder.
Some days back, Dropbox mailed me to let me know it had stopped syncing my files because I wasn't paying them. Apparently, part of the biiiig upgrade was some change to their billing systems. And they'd forgotten my payment information. For a while, they'd given me a free trial. They'd been sending me emails which I suppose were asking me to tell them my billing information again… which I ignored, because they had subject lines like "Your free trial is ending soon" and I "knew" they had payment information already…
Rather than wait for the next thing to break, it was easier just to set up a new backup system on top of something other than DropBox. If something doesn't work, I'll find out sooner rather than after several days of innocuous emails. There's probably a lesson there about new-development versus maintenance, a philosophical point I'll calmly consider when I can stop worrying about whether my files are really being backed up.
