Back Up Everything All The Time Forever

October 11th, 2009Blog0 comments

T-Mobile Says All Your Sidekick Data Has Been Lost Forever: Plenty of very angry Sidekick users have just discovered that all their contact information, calendars, to-dos, pictures, and other data they were storing on Microsoft’s cloud servers has been destroyed, and there were no backups.

You must always keep backups of your own data no matter what. We can’t rely on corporations or other people to handle our backups for us. This also illustrates why making data 100% electronic is a fairly bad idea. Two thousand years after Julius Caesar died, we still know what he looked like because of marble statues — the medium used to transmit that information is nearly indestructible. But if we were to drop all of our books into a digital-only Kindle-like format, a good EMP blast could wipe out our history forever. Another reason why BOOKS RULE.

I keep three constantly synchronized data backups of all my writing. This includes off-site backups. I also have a paper record: I use 120-page lab notebooks to jot down notes, log calls, make diary entries, and do actual writing. Everything is indexed and eventually moved into the computer. I’m currently about to finish filling my 30th such notebook. A notebook is a lot harder to delete than a file, although it can be lost/stolen. But then again, so can a laptop. Plus notebooks don’t break down.

Bad Microsoft! Bad Danger/T-Mobile! By the way, this is what happens when you store your data in a cloud. Clouds are, like, made out of water vapor. Storing your data in them is a totally bad idea.