Heroku / Paperclip Image Uploads Without S3?

Question

I've deployed my app to Heroku, which uses Paperclip for image uploads. The functionality works fine without S3, should I still use S3 for storage? What exactly is it doing when I don't use S3?

Answer 1

Paperclip is writing the uploads to disk. Any files written to disk on Heroku will only persist until the Dyno is restarted. At that point all your uploads will be lost.