To Hell with Backups  

This is an iSight camera. It was the webcam Apple used before they had them built-in. It sold for more money than most, but I had one. It was a gift from my mom. She gave it to me a few weeks before I left for South Korea. I used it to Skype home.

The iSight camera came in an unwieldy large case, because it had a bevy of accessories. One of these was a magnetic stand, to be used with the iMacs of the time (they had flat tops you could rest things like webcams and Pikmin). This magnet was pretty strong, but I don’t at all know the specifications of it (or of any magnets, really. I don’t know from magnets). I had an iBook, so I didn’t have much use for it anyway. It never purposefully came out of the box.

I returned from South Korea with a hard drive full of photos, documents, and memories. It wasn’t the best experience of my life, but it was at least well documented (I regularly blogged about the experience on an iWeb site that no longer exists). At some point, I grabbed the box for the iSight camera to grab a cord or something, and the magnet fell out, onto my desk, on top of my laptop. Now, today’s SSD-fueled laptops don’t really have this problem, but anyone with a typical spinning hard drive knows what happens next. Within a few seconds, my screen froze up. I panicked and removed the magnet, but the damage had been done. My hard drive was toast.

I suppose I could have been like my friend and podcast co-host Rich, who still has a broken drive from 1999. He’s kept it, hoping that one day the prices on custom drive repair will go down.

I lost everything that wasn’t backed up. These backups were sporadic and not recent. I had uploaded a few dozen of my photos to Flickr, and that set has always been nice about allowing full-size downloads. I had many of my documents saved on a DVD I made before I left the country, but not all. Finally, I had all my music on my iPod Video. But everything else (maybe 20 gigs of stuff) was gone forever.

My current workflow is a hack-job #

After this incident, I’ve been better about keeping recent backups, but I’ve fallen into almost every trap that could emerge. I was cursed by every technological failure one could dream up. And I was plagued with exhaustion and eventual ennui. I have never asked “what’s the point of anything?” more often than when I’ve dealt with backups.

At first, I just bought an external hard drive. It backed up everything with Time Machine, except for when it just didn’t, which was about half the time. I currently use two external hard drives at home: one connected to my router, one sitting on my desk. The one on my desk performs a “File History” backup (it’s like Time Machine but for Windows 8), and I routinely back up individual files to it and the network drive.

I use Dropbox (and pay for it) and have seen it it delete files out of nowhere, into nothing, never to be seen again. I use (and pay for) Evernote, which has become loads better but used to randomly forget about the existence of certain notebooks (which may appear again later but also not). I’ve never used Backblaze or any other cloud-based automatic backup, because until recently my bandwidth cap would have been destroyed by a single use. I accidentally deleted my Flickr account in 2010 (which is not as bad as when Flickr did it to themselves). And let’s not even mention MobileMe. That one still hurts.

Because of these problems (both mine and the software’s) my archive is spotty. It’s less spotty now than it used to be, but those old spots are still spots. I’ll never get those bits back, and it makes me angry that I ever even tried at all. But even if those apps worked perfectly, there’s still the human problem. The real problem with backups isn’t storage space, bandwidth, or external forces. It’s us. I’m the problem. You’re the problem. And there’s just no damn way to fix that.

You can set automatic backups any number of ways, but unless you manually check to make sure they’re working (by performing a search or recover or what-have-you) then it’s worthless. Time Machine will sometimes just forget to backup for weeks, or keep spinning on the same odd file for a few days, missing other things. If you pay attention, you can usually catch it, but who pays attention to Time Machine? File History for Windows is absolutely no better. And any system that backs up your entire machine as a full image (think Carbon Copy) requires you to boot from it to make sure it works. You won’t. You’ll forget. Because you suck, just like I suck, just like everybody sucks. When a computer is working fine, you have no time to make sure Thunderbirds are Go. The only time you wish you’d worked on this problem is after everything is gone.

My current solution is to use a mixture of Dropbox, Skydrive, and two external hard drives works well, but it’s tedious and manual. I’ve actually created a form that I use for each project, with links for each location. That’s my current setup: paperwork. On top of that, I’m trying really hard to go totally paperless. I bought a tiny Epson scanner, and use Evernote’s watch folder to automatically import everything. But I have absolutely no doubt that I will quickly tire of that particular excursion. It makes my head hurt to know myself this well, but still try.

It doesn’t matter who you are: you subscribe to one of three backup philosophies.

Backup solution #1: Screw it #

Life is short. If I’ve learned anything from having my stuff just disappear, it’s that you can absolutely live without it. You can just start again from scratch. All the stuff you’ve made that’s now gone? Well, whatever. It was just stuff. This is a flippant attitude to have, but it is absolutely valid, and possibly the only attitude about backups that’s in any way cool.

That isn’t to say you shouldn’t care, but convincing people that don’t care is a waste of time. And it’s not one of those things where you wait until they have severe data loss and they learn their lesson, because they’ve already accepted that as a given. Maybe they’re ignorant of what that actually means or they haven’t thought it through, I don’t know. But I have a sneaking suspicion that they have in fact thought it through and not caring is streets ahead.

I can say with the utmost confidence that most people I know have this attitude. They do nothing, and they do this because it’s not only the easiest route that requires the least amount of thought and energy, it’s also probably the best. I highly recommend this method, but unfortunately it’s not a choice. You do not have the ability to care or not. You either do (like me), or you don’t (the lucky bastard majority). It’s sort of like how I envy people who love top 40 music, because that’s a part of their life that’s just super easy.

I care, which means I lose.

Backup Solution #2: Do your best, but accept your place as a meaningless speck in the universe #

I think I actually exist here, but I’m constantly tempted to slip deeper into the last category. Self esteem and exhaustion keep me here. I try really hard to back up my digital life. As I mentioned, I am using Dropbox and Skydrive and Evernote, and those three things get backed up to two seperate drives. I do this manually because I just plain don’t trust any automatic method, and I’m perpetually a week or five behind a full backup because I only have so much energy for the most boring thing on the planet.

I would imagine a good majority are here with me, with at least something like Time Machine running or Dropbox syncing. This method works fine. It really does. In fact, I’d suggest putting minimal effort into backing up will serve everyone just fine, so long as they accept that, suddenly, it can all go away. Dropbox can vanish tomorrow. Evernote can forget everything. Your hard drive can erupt into flames. Your child can spill milk (does that look clean to you?). Israeli forces could blow it to smithereens. And that movie you’ve been working on for years might just get “RM*‘d”.

The only downside to this method, so far as I’ve seen, is the temper tantrum. I have no idea why this happens, but it absolutely does: when your stuff disappears and your backup fails you, the next thing that happens is a temporary return to infancy. You don’t understand why the world has turned against you, and no amount of pragmaticism or humour will stop a barrage of pouting and outrage. I’d like to think I’ve grown out of this, but I’m thirty and I felt the full brunt of it two weeks ago when Time Machine temporarily failed at work. I felt like such an idiot, but for a few moments I was six years old again. It goes away quickly, mostly when you realize that a) you only have so much control in a universe governed by forces you don’t understand, and b) it’s just stuff.

Backup Solution #3: Be the Ball #

Buy a ton of services and external drives, hundreds of dollars worth every year. Back up all your files every damn day, and then back up your whole system. Make sure some of these backups exist in servers in other countries with different climates. Then take some of those drives to work or your grandmother’s in case everything burns down. (if you’ve ever said “well, what if there’s a fire” when it comes to your setup, you’re in this camp.) Make that trip every week. Spend time every day making sure everything is working as it should by booting from backup images and drawing files from Time Machine or File History or whatever things you use (and use all of them, all at once).

There is a ton of information at the Library of Congress archives, including this quick video that explains why it’s extremely important to backup properly. Want to dive even deeper? There’s a conference for that.

The upside to this level of dedication is your stuff will almost certainly be safe. Back up to enough places and you’ll reach a sort of file storage safety net, where any one spot failing means nothing the greater system. But the downsides are catastrophic to your free time, your expendable mental energy (you know, the stuff you use to make the things you want to back up), and your social life. Care too much about backing up and you run the risk of encouraging your friends to backup. Don’t do this. Backing up isn’t fun. It isn’t fun to talk about. It’s less fun to do. It’s way less fun to keep doing. And the least fun thing of all is trying to convince other people that it might be a good idea.

So to hell with it #

I’ve known too many people who have had similar stories like mine: somethig stupid happens, and now everything is gone. But even that won’t change a habit, and it especially won’t make people care about proper workflows about things they’ve never thought about before. Catastrophic data loss may convert some people (and, really, I’m sure that it’s converted more people than simply the fear that something bad might someday occur) but it’s not nearly effective enough.

I think the reasons for this are twofold: a lack of dedication, and a lack of really caring for the things. Digital things don’t carry the same weight as physical things (partially because we can copy them so easily [and back them up]).

Huge thanks to Shelly and Hugh for providing links and advice regarding good backup practices.