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PSA: Back Up Your Shit

jwz.org

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Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#71

Post by tunap »

foobarian wrote: post #68
JunkDNA wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is one of the points from a book I read recently. His tech advice other than digital archiving was questionable, but all in all, a good read:

http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Minimalist-Life/dp/144955...

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#72

Post by greenyoda »

count wrote: post #41
greenyoda wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that article, jwz wrote: That third drive? Do a backup onto it the same way, then take that to your office and lock it in a desk. Every few months, bring it home, do a backup, and immediately take it away again. This is your "my house burned down" backup. If you work for someone other than yourself, it might be safer to keep that drive at the home of a trusted friend or relative (or a safe-deposit box) rather than…

Encrypt your backups.

Then your employer could just refuse to allow you to remove the drive from their premises, since you'd have no way of proving that it doesn't contain the employer's data. Which may not be so bad, if you have another copy of the backup somewhere. The worst-case scenario would be that your primary backup drive fails on the day you get fired.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#73

Post by gwu78 »

"Remember: if it's not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it's not really yours."

So, if we store our data in "the cloud", it's not really ours?

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#74

Post by aaronem »

greenyoda wrote: post #72
count wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encrypt your backups.

Then your employer could just refuse to allow you to remove the drive from their premises, since you'd have no way of proving that it doesn't contain the employer's data. Which may not be so bad, if you have another copy of the backup somewhere. The worst-case scenario would be that your primary backup drive fails on the day you get fired.

The IT staff wiping the drive to their satisfaction should obviate that concern, I'd imagine.

And the worst-case scenario would be that happening, and your primary backup drive failing, and your running drive failing, on the day you get fired. A failed primary backup drive just means you're out a backup; it takes a failure of the drive you're backing up for the situation to achieve disastrous proportions.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#75

Post by aaronem »

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…

> I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone.

You must be a delightful dinner companion.

Fine, that's a cavil. This is not: Disk is cheap. My time is precious. It's a lot quicker and easier to just dump everything into a big greppable bucket, on the off-chance that five or ten years from now I might need to fish something out of it, than to spend hours or even minutes picking and choosing.

Of course, excepting a reimage after disk failure, the odds that I'll ever actually need to pull something out of my backups are low -- but if the dice ever come up snake eyes, I'll certainly be able to retrieve whatever it is I'm after, while doing things your way has the same low-but-nonzero chance of needing to go fishing, plus a nonzero chance of not being able to retrieve whatever it is because you didn't think it was worth backing up.

You present your attitude toward backups as originating in a need to suppress what must be an extraordinary susceptibility to a swelled head. May I suggest your efforts in that area are perhaps slightly less complete than you fancy them to be? But that's your problem to address, and of course you're free to take whatever chance you please, and waste however much time suits you, in pursuit of that admirable end. Me, I'll just keep shoveling everything into a big cheap bucket, on the off-chance I'll need to fish something out later on.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#76

Post by mappu »

mmanfrin wrote: post #46

PSA: It is not 1999, please don't use neon green text on a black background as your color scheme for text.

I was once walking with a friend through the university library. We walked past a kid using irc on his laptop with neon green and purple on black text, font size as high as it would go, all in Comic Sans no less. Epitome of tackiness.

I made some idle snide remark about it. My friend points out that he knows the guy, who turns out to have significant visual impairment.

Cue feeling embarrassed for the rest of the afternoon :(

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#77

Post by artmageddon »

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…

My previous iPhone is 4 years old(3GS, now I have a 5S), and I couldn't back up my texts because the backups are encrypted, and password-protected. I could swear I never put a password on them, but now I have no idea whether I really did or not. I don't know if it's something I can still extract off my old phone :(

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#78

Post by prawn »

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?

Depends. I throw out most cards I've received and wouldn't care about saving SMSes, but I do want to keep emails for reference and would want to save tweets and especially Instagram photos. Online chats I wouldn't care about and have no expectation of storing.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#79

Post by hippee-lee »

flipstewart wrote: post #19

I do throw away letters. I'd rather not live in the past or cling to ephemera for emotional reasons, thank you.

Do you plan on having children? Will your grandchildren's grandchildren wonder where they came frome and what it was like?

If only I could query the daily activities and conversations of my great grandparents or query thousands of photos and movies for people, places and moments that my have been talked about when I was a child. I could understand my family better. Educate my daughter more fully and with better context other than telling her: well part of your family comes from the abruzzi region in Italy and another part comes from Germany, I think. And your mother, I don't know much about her grandparents let along great grandparents.

It's not always about us, or right now, that is important in the scope of life a cross generations. We don't always know which of the ephemeral things in daily life are worth passing on to the next generation. Sometime they ( the next or several generations on down the line ) identify or rediscover our best moments long after we are gone.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#80

Post by ThatGeoGuy »

I hate to be that guy who plugs his own crap everywhere, but I actually wrote my own blog post recently about backing up my stuff on Linux.

My setup is fairly rudimentary, and I had the help of a friend on IRC, but here's the link if anyone is interested in setting up something simple for a Linux workstation at home or a VPS you can ssh into (really, as long as you can SSH into it with rsync, my method will work). I'd also love any feedback HN can give regarding my mechanism. Hell, if you wanted to fully back up a phone and sdcard on your desktop, you could probably do something similar with "adb pull" or the like.

https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/posts/howto-encrypted-backups-in-...

That out of the way, I'm often surprised by how often I have to remind either myself or others to make good backups. Phone's aside, there's been enough times where I've nuked my system that backing up all my files should be secondhand at this point. Thankfully, I have a decent system set up now, but I still consider it rough around the edges (especially considering how long archiving backups takes).

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