Koralatov
Archive
Projects
Contact
RSS
October 22, 2010 at 2:29pm
Reblogged from valhallaisland
17 notes (∞)
This professor is not only reckless enough to keep a single copy of his entire life’s work on a laptop but he then thinks it’ll be safe to temporarily “hide it” in a semi-public place while he does his laundry. He didn’t deserve to have his data returned.

—

Jim Whimpey, on the story of a thief that returned the data from a stolen laptop to its owner (naturally, s/he kept the laptop itself).

I’m on the same page as Whimpey regarding the recklessness of this guy, and how undeserving he is of having his data returned.  It isn’t the ’90s any more, and backup isn’t hard or time-consuming or technically challenging like it used to be; it’s now so trivially easy to set in place automatic, off-site backups, for free, that there is no excuse if you don’t have them in place.

I take a relatively ruthless view on backups.  I take the view that I can afford to lose anything non-critical.  Yes, it would be nice to have a Time Machine backup to restore my system to a exactly how I left it before it died/was stolen, but I don’t need that.  I have less than 2 GB of data that I genuinely need, and I guard that data jealously.  I have incremental backups running daily onto an SD card (rotated frequently with another which I keep in my desk at work); the incremental backups are also uploaded to my iDisk; and the same data is backed up to Mozy as it changes; and finally, anything that is my current project is also stored in my Dropbox, because it will sync changes almost instantly.

This setup costs me less than £70 a year in MobileMe renewals and the occasional SD card.  It could be done for less if I didn’t renew my MobileMe.  It takes practically no time, and almost no technical knowledge, to set it up.  The hardest part of it was realising what data I needed to be backed up constantly, and what data only needed to be backed up and stored off-site once: my music I can lose, because I have the original CDs; my photos are backed up on SD cards and stored at work; my email is on an IMAP server.  None of that requires constant backup, which leaves me with a remarkably small amount of data that I must back up.  And since it’s so easy to do it now, and it’s free, secure, automated, and offsite, why wouldn’t I back up my stuff?

Notes

  1. memorylog-reari reblogged this from koralatov
  2. koralatov reblogged this from valhallaisland and added:
    Jim Whimpey, on the...thief that returned the data from a stolen laptop to its owner...
  3. valhallaisland reblogged this from indefensible and added:
    Ironically enough, this story makes me lose hope...This professor is not only reckless...
  4. indefensible posted this

Copyright © 1997–2011 Koralatov