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PSA: Back Up Your Shit

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Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#21

Post by sliverstorm »

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?

Things like forum updates and twitter spam and such, I delete immediately, but everything else I save. Years and years of email for me adds up to about 20MB (compressed), minus pruning of attachments. 20MB is practically free, and who knows, I might want it some day.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#22

Post by Nicholas_C »

unepipe wrote: post #16
Nicholas_C wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had an iPhone 4 with iOS5 and an extremely old version of iTunes. It hadn't synced it in a long time as iTunes had stopped recognizing my phone. Further, windows on the computer I used to back it up on is now not booting at all. I have assumed that all my iPhone data, if any, would be on that computer unless it was saved in the cloud. Is that correct?

EDIT: I also unregistered my iPhone because I bought an S4 and couldn't receive texts from those with iMessage turned on, as their phones were still iMessaging me. Am I doomed?

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#23

Post by dded »

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?

> but I actually /do/ throw my letters in the trash

You still send and receive letters? Somebody sits down, puts pen to paper and writes a letter? Folds it, puts it in an envelope, adds postage, and mails it?

Outside of hokey "Christmas letters" (typed once, printed, and mailed to many), I haven't seen a real letter in many years.

I'd say I envy you, but then someone else would reply and tell me that if I like letters so much I should send one. And I suppose I should, but I know I won't. I'll send an e-mail.

In any case, if I got letters I wouldn't throw them in the trash.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#24

Post by skywhopper »

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. I find I'm happier when I let go of all of that stuff. Trying to hang onto everything just leads to stress and worry that I'm not managing to keep everything. Or that it's not perfectly organized, or that it's not adequately searchable.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#25

Post by synesso »

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?

Absolutely. Throw away as much as you can. > you want to save them forever Nope, very wrong.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#26

Post by Aloha »

It drives me nuts that pidgin and adium use different logging interfaces - its made switching from Windows to OSX more painful - as I still use finch on Linux, and use file syncing to sync logs and config files across platforms.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#27

Post by ANTSANTS »

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?

It's not just you. My fear is opposite to the one the author describes: That by using these services, all these messages that I treat as ephemeral are actually being recorded forever, and 20+ years from now something I said offhand to a friend or a stranger will be used to embarrass or discredit me.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#30

Post by unepipe »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #22
unepipe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had an iPhone 4 with iOS5 and an extremely old version of iTunes. It hadn't synced it in a long time as iTunes had stopped recognizing my phone. Further, windows on the computer I used to back it up on is now not booting at all. I have assumed that all my iPhone data, if any, would be on that computer unless it was saved in the cloud. Is that correct? EDIT: I also unregistered my iPhone because I bought an S4 and c…

You could potentially remove the hard drive from that computer, then put it in an external casing and hook it up to a new computer. Then research software to pull messages out of your old backups. You could potentially still salvage the messages, it sounded like they were old ones
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