Perpetual Rewiring

Run Your Backups

Published on

Seriously, go run them right now.

Whatever copies your important personal files.1 Should only take a minute or two.2

If you don't have any backups, zip3 your most important folder with today's date. Stick it on a USB drive or any other storage which isn't the same physical device it was originally on. Doing that once a month is already more than most people have.

If you already have automated backups, run an integrity check or manually retrieve some files.

If any of these things take more than a few minutes, set a reminder to make it faster later.

The slower something is, the less you do it. The less you do it, the more likely it is to break when you aren't looking.

This should be something you can safely do with absolute confidence on a whim while half asleep. Make saving yourself the easiest thing you can do.

You never know when you'll need it.

- Rew

Nightly Notes

No, I haven't recently lost data.

I simply woke up in the morning and thought it was a good day to backup my files. Yes, I know how absurd that sounds.

But I think it's a good goal to have, making your backups easy enough that you can randomly decide to run them. My system is enough to make sure if one of my devices dies I lose minimal data and can get up and running on a new device in an hour.

It's not natural disaster proof. I'm not worried about that. I only got this far from slow and steady improvements over the last five years. There's no rush to finish, only to start, and to continue.

Have you run them yet?

- Rew

  1. Note that proper backups must be separate from wherever your main file storage is, and ideally versioned. File sync is not a backup, it's a copy of all your mistakes. Some cloud tools will keep old versions of your files temporarily, which is a form of backup. But do you know for how long? ↩

  2. If you work with a large amount of data, it might take longer. But if you're working with that much, you should probably be backing up more often. ↩

  3. Zip is not the best file format for this, but it's built into almost everything. The point is to get started. You can switch to a better system later when you have time, you can't save your files from now later. ↩