Back it up

Backing up your data is dull. It just is. It’s insurance. And that’s dull too. It takes time. It’s not exciting, fun or life enhancing. Until, that is, you’ve experienced the stomach churning moment where you look catastrophic data loss in the eyes. When was the last time you backed up? Was it on the USB disk your brother bought you? Where is it now? Have you checked it lately? There is an easier and better way.

TL;DR; Have one place where all your master data is stored. Put it in the cloud.

A few years ago I was helping a friend of mine. I had gone to stay with her in Nice while I was having a bad time of it. She listened to me drone on about stuff and generally healed my soul while I fought back the tears as I observed that she had over 5,000 unread emails, documents all over her MacBook desktop (you couldn’t see the wallpaper), no filing system, no backups, four hundred browser tabs which had been open since January (it was June) and fuck knew what else. I asked if she ever shut her laptop down. She insisted she did and showed me how by closing the lid. She laughed.

While this sort of thing causes me overt anxiety, it turns out that it causes anxiety even for those who perpetrate the crime. And it is a crime. Against me. But this was also a cry for help, and since she was putting up with my moping, I paid her back with computer help.

She already had a google account and had google drive installed. I did a quick search and at the time Google offered the most competitive £/GB — and available up to 1TB — which was a good amount in 2014. So we went with that. She got her credit card out and then I got her to move EVERYTHING she had — and there was a lot, she is prolific and creative — into her Google Drive folder. I created a few starter folders for her: Work, Photos, Documents, Writing, Desktopshit and so on. I got her to install the apps on her phone and tablet and she loved it — not only was her work backed up but she could work on her own data across devices. Actual magic. It only took about half an hour (and then 5 days to sync over a bad internet connection).

Anyway — this got me to thinking I ought to do the same thing. Here I was giving a friend sound advice that I wasn’t following myself. I had been doing manual backups to NAS but I always had nagging fears: what would happen if there was a fire? Or my home was broken into? Not only that, but the last 4 weeks of work is always the most valuable and is precisely the work which is lost. And I kept forgetting to do those backups. I already had a Dropbox account and preferred it to Google Drive but it only offered 100GB. But by some lucky coincidence Dropbox soon upgraded their pro service to 1TB to match Google. I started using it in an instant.

So which one? #

I guess my point is that it doesn’t matter which cloud service you use — I’m fairly agnostic about the whole thing. Dropbox works for me. Google has my email, Microsoft, my operating system. And Amazon somehow makes me feel uneasy — I know they all share services anyway but I’d prefer my data somewhere else. There are others too — check them out — but Dropbox feels good to me: it has good data recovery options, undelete, good sharing, links, no nonsense with duplicate files. That said I am aware that their behaviour has caused concern. The choice is yours.

Now what? #

Now you’ve chosen — enable two factor authentication. Then get every single important bit of data you have: essays, papers, scans, photos, audio — all of it — and put it in the sync folder. Mine looks a bit like this:

Then let it sync up. You can organise your data later. First, back it up.

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