Understanding Backup, Restore

Occasionally i get an email asking for help when a Customer has "lost my Collection" in Dropbox. Today a customer contacted me with the following message:

Hope you can help, I was trying to add a coin in my collection from my phone by using backup to Dropbox and then I tried putting it on my I pad by restoring think it would pull it in but it just moved that coin to I pad and I lost all my other collections.

A restore operation REPLACES everything you have on your device with whatever was in the Cloud. REPLACE COLLECTION ON DEVICE”.
Notice in bold capital letters on the Restore view it says: “

Backup and Restore work like the movie Higlhlander, there can be only one original copy of a collection. If you want to add a coin to a collection, and then share that change to every device, here’s how you do it:

1) Ensure your device has an up-to-date copy of the collection. 

2) Add the new coin

3) Backup the changes

4) Switch to other device

5) Restore the changes made on device in step #2

Result: Second device now has changes

Now let’s say you want to add a photo to the newly added coin. Here are the steps:

1) Ensure your device has an up-to-date copy of the collection.

2) Select the coin you want to photo

3) Take the photo and add it to the coin

4) Backup changes

5) Switch to other device(s)

6) Restore and notice the new photo

The key to this process is to realize that the Cloud must always be the source of truth. Before you add, change, or delete, you need to ensure your device has an up-to-date copy of the collection. If you are not sure, do a Restore and you will now have whatever the Cloud has. Then make your changes, and finally, Backup to the Cloud so the Cloud now has the original copy of the collection.

The nice part of this, if there is any, is that if you make a mistake on your device, you can always do a Restore and effectively UNDO whatever changes you made.

Tip

If you accidentally replace your collection in Dropbox, Dropbox has an undelete.
You can read about it here.

After you restore the undeleted files in Dropbox, do a RESTORE on your device.