Syncing does not apply to ships and backing up is not what happens to your sewer in the world of Informant!
In support on a regular basis we see cases where customers are referring to using Informant and the Informant backup service or Informant with the Google Calendar backup. Then there are others who talk to us about their Dropbox sync service.
These are not interchangeable items. Its like calling a trip to the grocery store a hunting trip. In the end the results can be similar but not the same and arriving at that result is vastly different. The hunting trip usually but not always results in having food, while the trip the grocery store will result in having food.
Using a sync service as a data backup is like hunting, your data may or may not be recoverable in the event that something catastrophic happens and you lose your data.
Whereas a true backup of your data will recover your data to that backup point just like going to the grocery store means you will be able to get food verses the “maybe” if you are hunting.
Why? When you are syncing your data the data stored online is fluid and changes with each sync operation. This means that if your data is broken that the broken data is synced first to the sync service then to all of your devices, much like a cold is transmitted through an office. There would not be a way to recover your data in this scenario.
A backup is like a family photo you took when your kids were young. Its a snapshot of your data, its frozen in time at the moment it was taken and your data is stored that way forever. Later backups are like later family photos, the kids are changing and that is reflected in the photo. However that original photo is exactly the same. No amount of new photos will change it. The backup file is the same way, backups can be collected so if todays backup file is a backup of corrupted data you can roll back to the backup file from yesterday and be restored up to that point.
Backups do not work well for syncing because each time you restore a backup file the current database in Informant is overwritten with the backup data. Sort of like repainting your house each time you pay the electric bill. Its a lot of effort with little to gain and has to be done often.
In closing, backup services such as Dropbox or even the internal Informant data backups are just that a backup of your data. They are insurance in case something does happen to your data.
Syncing data is for keeping the most current information shared between your devices. It is not a good insurance policy against data loss in the event something goes wrong.
None of this is applicable if you are using iOS (Device) events or reminders in Informant iOS or If you have your Android device itself managing your Google data. For that stay tuned for my next article When Is An Apple Not An Apple or That Is Not the Android That You Are Looking For.
Wesley Sandlin
Global Support Manager