Live data from Hacker News

PSA: Back Up Your Shit

jwz.org

81–90 of 137 posts

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#81
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.

Or perhaps more commonly to build a complete picture of you, including your movements, contacts and social network spanning decades, which will be sold on a grey market, so that companies can more easily exploit your fears and foibles to sell you things you don't need, and target your dreams for monetisation.

Even if no-one needs to discredit you, an entire history of you will always have value, and companies like Google, Apple and Facebook will have unique access to it.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#82
I want to use this opportunity to thank drstanleyspelltemple@hotmail.com for helping me get my lover back after he left me few months ago. I have sent friends and my brothers to beg him for me but he refused and said that it is all over between both of us but when I met this Dr. Stanley, he told me to relaxed that every thing will be fine and after three days and contacted him, I got my man back......Caitlin

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#85

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. "

If we are talking about something, (as opposed to just chatting around) I prefer when people look up facts they are unsure about. Especially if the alternative is guessing out of what they vaguely remember.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#86
post #75

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 a…

I feel your first sentence is unnecessary and more a meme than a reasonable answer.

Plus, people might consider NOT playing with your phone during dinner a really delightful thing. (My wife would be proud of me mentioning this, not that I tend to be that polite most of the time..)

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#87
I really see no use in backing up much from any social media/messaging applications, most of the content is trivial garbage. I never go through old Facebook conversations or look through old twitter content to indulge in past events. I could see people backing up photos or videos on some media, but other than that, nah.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#88
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?

Not at all. I suspect that I'd want to save: - 50% of photos - 5% of emails - 1% of chats - selective tweets and links I come across. Definitely not everything.

But how do you know which n% ahead of time?

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#89

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'…

Any idea how to mount and open additional encrypted drives automatically, just like an encrypted /home partition at user login? I asked this ages ago on AskUbuntu http://askubuntu.com/q/103835 and by the time I got a good answer I'd already moved to a more complex set-up that was incompatible.

I'm okay with setting up rsync and grabbing everything I want backed up, then pointing it to a target drive. My issue is having to manually intervene by clicking on the drive (in Nautilus) to mount it - or having to type the password at boot.

I'm still looking for a good solution to 'automagically' mount encrypted drives at user login.

Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit

#90
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

I feel your first sentence is unnecessary and more a meme than a reasonable answer. Plus, people might consider NOT playing with your phone during dinner a really delightful thing. (My wife would be proud of me mentioning this, not that I tend to be that polite most of the time..)

You can play a game: everyone puts their phone in the middle of the table, the first person to pick theirs up during the meal pays the bill for the entire table (or split it if no-one does). There is another variant on this game that can be played with a goldfish bowl...
Post reply on HN