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PSA: Back Up Your Shit

jwz.org

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Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#11

Post by ovulator »

borski wrote: post #2

"You don't just throw your letters in the trash. You might want them some day." Maybe it's just me, but I actually /do/ throw my letters in the trash. I /do/ treat Twitter, etc. as ephemeral and passing. I don't care about saving those messages. Am I the only one?

I have always treated IM and the like as phone calls. I don't keep tape back ups of every phone call I have ever made, once the conversation is over, no one should have a record of it. (in a perfect world this would include the communications provider and the NSA...but alas...)

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#12

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

borski wrote: post #2

"You don't just throw your letters in the trash. You might want them some day." Maybe it's just me, but I actually /do/ throw my letters in the trash. I /do/ treat Twitter, etc. as ephemeral and passing. I don't care about saving those messages. Am I the only one?

No. But then I don't like taking pictures of myself and friends holding alcoholic beverages while grinning stupidly into the camera either, which I noticed is somehow popular.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#13

Post by codva »

I delete all email after 90 days, unless I explicitly moved it to an archive folder.

I've never event thought about saving IMs, texts, Twitter, etc. Civilization has survived a very long time without a written record of every conversation ever. It will continue to do so.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#14

Post by BlackDeath3 »

codva wrote: post #13

I delete all email after 90 days, unless I explicitly moved it to an archive folder. I've never event thought about saving IMs, texts, Twitter, etc. Civilization has survived a very long time without a written record of every conversation ever. It will continue to do so.

Civilization survived a long time without penicillin.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#15

Post by Nicholas_C »

famousactress wrote: post #3

Thanks for this. The SMS export from iPhone is something I've been looking for. One of the most important relationships and experiences of my entire life has been documented (trapped) in my phone and it's backups ever since. I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works, specifically whether it can pull photos/videos as well. If it doesn't yet but it wouldn't be too much trouble to add, I'd be willing to literally…

I lost my iPhone (had it stolen?) a few weeks ago along with several years of text messages, voice recordings, and notes from my best friend I had known since 5th grade who recently passed away. I had always planned to back it up or record it somehow but was only starting to get to it when I lost it. My greatest regret of 2013 is not backing up those texts, notes, voicemails, etc.. Back it up as soon as you can and don't put it off or you may regret it. Thankfully, I had backed up all our pictures over the years, and backed up that back up, but I would pay a lot of money to have that phone back.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#16

Post by unepipe »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #15
famousactress wrote: post #3

Thanks for this. The SMS export from iPhone is something I've been looking for. One of the most important relationships and experiences of my entire life has been documented (trapped) in my phone and it's backups ever since. I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works, specifically whether it can pull photos/videos as well. If it doesn't yet but it wouldn't be too much trouble to add, I'd be willing to literally…

I lost my iPhone (had it stolen?) a few weeks ago along with several years of text messages, voice recordings, and notes from my best friend I had known since 5th grade who recently passed away. I had always planned to back it up or record it somehow but was only starting to get to it when I lost it. My greatest regret of 2013 is not backing up those texts, notes, voicemails, etc.. Back it up as soon as you can and d…

As long as you plugged your iphone into your computer regularly with backups on, or joined your home wifi network while your computer was on the network with wifi backups on, it should still be in the backups, which would get loaded to your new phone if you loaded the new phone you bought from the most recent backup.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#17

Post by stuff4ben »

codva wrote: post #13

I delete all email after 90 days, unless I explicitly moved it to an archive folder. I've never event thought about saving IMs, texts, Twitter, etc. Civilization has survived a very long time without a written record of every conversation ever. It will continue to do so.

that's a good policy I'm going to start following at work. I have every email I've sent or received for the past 4 years I've worked at this particular company. Prior to that I saved my emails from other jobs in the same way. But I rarely go back into those archives for anything.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#18

Post by jamesbritt »

borski wrote: post #2

"You don't just throw your letters in the trash. You might want them some day." Maybe it's just me, but I actually /do/ throw my letters in the trash. I /do/ treat Twitter, etc. as ephemeral and passing. I don't care about saving those messages. Am I the only one?

I get text messages for all sorts things, such as calendar reminders, CC use, server jobs that have completed.

I was thinking to delete the CC and reminder messages, but then I thought it might be fun one day to do some self-archaeology and look back over them. "Oh, that's when I bought that book; Oh, yeah, I never went to that event. Wow, that long ago?"

I realize that this information is available in other places but the simple timeline of messages might make it interesting in some odd way.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#20

Post by toffer »

famousactress wrote: post #3

Thanks for this. The SMS export from iPhone is something I've been looking for. One of the most important relationships and experiences of my entire life has been documented (trapped) in my phone and it's backups ever since. I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works, specifically whether it can pull photos/videos as well. If it doesn't yet but it wouldn't be too much trouble to add, I'd be willing to literally…

If you search Github for "iphone sms" or "iphone messages", you can find lots of projects that will export your iPhone messages. So, if perl isn't your preferred language, there are plenty of other choices besides jwz's script.

I wrote an export script in Python that's fairly popular (200+ stars on Github): https://github.com/toffer/iphone-sms-backup

Unfortunately, I never did get around to exporting photos and videos.

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