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PSA: Back Up Your Shit

jwz.org

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Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#61

Post by cookiecaper »

IgorPartola wrote: post #53
ANTSANTS wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless you are a very prominent politician or on track to become one what do you care? I don't know... I more or less stand by what I have to say or I can honestly say that when I said it I was "young and stupid".

Social media account activity materially affects the prospects of many people who aren't politicians, especially if you engage in any controversial discussion. It's common for employers to name-search you and peruse your social media history, especially in careers that involve children like teaching, where naive new teachers are often terminated for putting child-inappropriate content on their public profiles, or getting linked to something they thought they'd shared anonymously.

"I was young and stupid" only works if the content in question is trivial or unimportant. If you happen to be on the opposite side of a political debate long since settled, you may end up getting yourself pwned pretty hard, even if you're not a politician.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#62

Post by JunkDNA »

incongruity wrote: post #40
steven2012 wrote: post #34

I think that the beauty of Snapchat is that it frees you from this ridiculous notion that a text, IM, Facebook message, etc, has any value. In my opinion, it doesn't. Also, in my opinion, I believe that feeling the need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense of self-worth, and that everything you say has value and needs to be saved. I never, ever peruse through my messages, to reminis…

Honestly, a lot of what you have to say make sense, it does... But then I remember that I still have the emails my wife exchanged almost ten years ago when we first met - and occasionally I do look back at those. And I fall in love with her all over again. And then there are the random musings from friends who have died or any of a dozen other, slightly less big deal reasons to look back -- and I realize that in fact…

Agree with this completely. My father died when I was 23. Being a digital packrat, I have every personal email I've ever sent or received. He wrote me quite regularly throughout college and I have all of those emails. All the life lessons and little bits of encouragement. My kids will never know their grandpa, but someday maybe we can share these together and they can learn a bit more about the kind of man he was in his own words, without my filter. They might also like some of the historically interesting ones like:

"Mike, check out this new store: http://www.amazon.com I think it's going to be popular. --Dad"

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#63

Post by IgorPartola »

cookiecaper wrote: post #61
IgorPartola wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are a very prominent politician or on track to become one what do you care? I don't know... I more or less stand by what I have to say or I can honestly say that when I said it I was "young and stupid".

Social media account activity materially affects the prospects of many people who aren't politicians, especially if you engage in any controversial discussion. It's common for employers to name-search you and peruse your social media history, especially in careers that involve children like teaching, where naive new teachers are often terminated for putting child-inappropriate content on their public profiles, or get…

Sure. However, then either watch what you say when using your real name or use a pseudonym. I don't always succeed, but I try to only say things online that I would say to the person IRL. That makes me think twice about it. I like to think that if someone was to look back through my comments or sites like HN where I use my real name, they would think that I am a reasonably reasonable human being.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#64

Post by Nicholas_C »

unepipe wrote: post #30
Nicholas_C wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Somehow I never considered this. Linux on my second partition actually boots up, so I can use my Linux OS to grab the files I believe. Thanks! I'll give it a shot!

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#65

Post by famousactress »

toffer wrote: post #20
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 video…

Oh wow, awesome! Since python is my preferred language anyways I'll likely dig into this first.. since I'd be happy to toss you a pull request for sucking in images and video if feasible. Stoked to play with this later. Cheers.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#66

Post by elwell »

JunkDNA wrote: post #62
incongruity wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, a lot of what you have to say make sense, it does... But then I remember that I still have the emails my wife exchanged almost ten years ago when we first met - and occasionally I do look back at those. And I fall in love with her all over again. And then there are the random musings from friends who have died or any of a dozen other, slightly less big deal reasons to look back -- and I realize that in fact…

Agree with this completely. My father died when I was 23. Being a digital packrat, I have every personal email I've ever sent or received. He wrote me quite regularly throughout college and I have all of those emails. All the life lessons and little bits of encouragement. My kids will never know their grandpa, but someday maybe we can share these together and they can learn a bit more about the kind of man he was in…

Very good point.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#67

Post by famousactress »

quantumpotato_ wrote: post #37
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…

What was the bug?

Coincidentally, before the friend I mentioned in #2 passed away we were out at a bar together and he was really interested in this girl who was there. They'd barely met and I guess he'd gone home and chatted with her on myspace. When I got up in the morning (he was living on my couch) he told me to go look at her profile. While cruising through his friends list I saw my now wife. I recognized her as being a friend of a friend I'd met months prior while we were both in a relationship. I pinged her surprised that her and my couch-surfing buddy were friends. They weren't. There was some sort of flaw in the rendering of my buddy's friends list and by the time we figured it out it had been resolved. That message started a really long conversation that led to our relationship. In fact I don't think we've gone more than a day or two without speaking since.

Hopefully the bug at least only allowed someone who was a friend of a friend (she was, just not my buddy's) to appear in the wrong list. Super sketchy if it was actually rendering complete strangers!

Regardless, I'm pretty sure if it wasn't for that bug I wouldn't be married to my incredible wife :)

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#68

Post by foobarian »

JunkDNA wrote: post #62
incongruity wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, a lot of what you have to say make sense, it does... But then I remember that I still have the emails my wife exchanged almost ten years ago when we first met - and occasionally I do look back at those. And I fall in love with her all over again. And then there are the random musings from friends who have died or any of a dozen other, slightly less big deal reasons to look back -- and I realize that in fact…

Agree with this completely. My father died when I was 23. Being a digital packrat, I have every personal email I've ever sent or received. He wrote me quite regularly throughout college and I have all of those emails. All the life lessons and little bits of encouragement. My kids will never know their grandpa, but someday maybe we can share these together and they can learn a bit more about the kind of man he was in…

People may or may not tend to hoarding stuff. For those who do, though, hoarding bits sure is a lot easier than hoarding physical possessions.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#69

Post by sliverstorm »

incongruity wrote: post #40
steven2012 wrote: post #34

I think that the beauty of Snapchat is that it frees you from this ridiculous notion that a text, IM, Facebook message, etc, has any value. In my opinion, it doesn't. Also, in my opinion, I believe that feeling the need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense of self-worth, and that everything you say has value and needs to be saved. I never, ever peruse through my messages, to reminis…

Honestly, a lot of what you have to say make sense, it does... But then I remember that I still have the emails my wife exchanged almost ten years ago when we first met - and occasionally I do look back at those. And I fall in love with her all over again. And then there are the random musings from friends who have died or any of a dozen other, slightly less big deal reasons to look back -- and I realize that in fact…

when disk space (on this scale especially) is a so cheap, it seems foolish not to save it.

This is the critical part for me. I delete the crap because it makes searching harder, but I currently spend $0.01/month backing up every email I've ever exchanged with my loved ones. Maybe I'll never need them, but at $1.20/decade, why would I not stash them? (It is, of course, all automated)

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#70

Post by [deleted] »

randomdrake wrote: post #29

Accessing your own data and storing it is great, but there's still the matter of backing it up. jwz wrote a good guide for that as well. It's linked in the article, but not in a way that makes it obvious. Thought it would be good to mention it here: http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

[deleted]
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