I never used to backup my hard drive. There was no reason, you see, because I was invincible to the perils of data loss. Then one day, I lost all of the data on my old PC, and was screwed.
That didn’t really teach me much of a lesson until Apple introduced Time Machine, and ever since then I’ve been backing up as frequently as possible. See for me, as I’m sure it is for many others, it comes down to being lazy. Spending even 5 minutes of my time backing up a volume just seems stupid. I mean, why not put it off another day? But plugging in a USB drive is easy, and those things are cheap now, to boot. Under $100 gets you at least 250 gb now, and sizes have increased up to a terabyte in a pretty convenient form factor. It’s a pretty convenient way to ensure that you’ll never lose your data.
But since I started backing up, I’m now hooked on the process. Whenever I finish an article for one of the magazines I write for, I copy the work to three separate sources, then store them in different locations. Now I always have three copies of everything I’ve done, that way I’m covered in case of fire, theft or vandalism.
It’s funny how one feature on an OS can change how you work, but for me, it did that and more.
2 thoughts on “Backing up is Fun”
A rather unfortunate start to a sentence…
“But plugging in a USB drive is easy”
I’m sure it is 🙂
I keep “essential” files in my dropbox [https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTcxMzU5OQ] which syncs between ALL my computers and the web plus I email myself a copy on my gmail accounts. With the storage space of google I have room for tons of file backups. PLUS if I need to access a file for a client while out and about, I just have to log into my email and its there.