backup strategies

Here's an odd post by Gina Barreca about a student of hers whose completely un-backed-up computer died. Everything was lost: documents of all kinds, photos, email, etc. Barreca's response: See, this is why you should print everything out. (Everything? Even the photos?)

Barreca says she pays for a backup service, though she seems to make a point of emphasizing that she doesn't understand it: "one of those companies which (I am told) will keep my stuff safe in the ether or the cloud or the memory of one really smart guy who’ll be able to recite everything I have on my hard-drive." So what she really relies on is "filled-to-overflowing filing cabinets of paper and shelves of hand-written notebooks."

Is that really the most appropriate response? About a month ago my computer died — as I mentioned in an earlier post — and I would have been completely miserable, indeed would be completely miserable for some time to come, if I could only rely on paper copies of everything. (Everything textual, that is: I don't think anyone could seriously suggest printing out high-resolution copies of every digital photo they've taken, and few would suggest burning every song they own to CD.) The best possible scenario for making materials useful to me again would be to scan them to PDF and use OCR software to make at least some of the text readable again. But this would take countless hours and would lead to highly imperfect results.

What I did instead: I had my whole computer backed up to an external hard drive in my office, my entire home folder backed up to Amazon S3, and my essential files backed up to Dropbox. So while I was waiting for my new computer to arrive I used Dropbox on other computers to keep working, and when the computer finally did show up I just transferred the whole contents of my previous computer to the new one. Using Apple's Migration Assistant, I set it up one afternoon when I left the office, and had everything in place when I got back the next morning.

And Barreca thinks it makes more sense just to print everything out? 

what to save, continued

Back to the subject of my previous post:

If trusting overmuch in the stability of the cloud — or any one particular cloud in the brave new world of what I like to call Big Sky Computing — is unwise, there are other problems to consider. What if the magazine whose website your link directs you to goes out of business? That’s not likely in the case of The New Yorker, you may say, but how confident can we be in the continued existence of any print publication in these difficult times? Plus, I have on my computer a whole bunch of dead links to New Yorker stories that, during their last major site restructuring, got taken off the web or reassigned to new URLs. Ditto with The New Republic, which has been promising to re-organize and re-present its archives for two or three years now.

The problem of disappearing websites is becoming more and more serious, and it’s interesting that among the first groups to take serious cognizance of that fact are librarians and archivists — people charged with preserving our cultural inheritance. Not easy to do when chunks of that cultural inheritance can be swept away with a couple of keystrokes. You can use the Wayback Machine to find a lot of stuff, but there’s a lot more that you’ll never recover that way.

So maybe it’s better to keep anything you think you’re likely to need on your own carefully-and-regularly-backed-up computer.* It’s not like webpages or PDFs — I save everything as PDF — take up that much hard drive space, especially in comparison to movies or high-resolution photos. And there are a whole set of wonderful information management tools out there — this is the one I use, after having tried pretty much everything available for the Mac — to help you store and organize almost anything you can download.

So why don't I do this more readily? Why is it my reflex to use Delicious? I think it’s because when I’m trying to decide what to do with a story or article I’ve found online, I am (by definition) working in my browser — and Delicious is also in my browser. And if it’s a link rather than a whole story I’m saving, that link will also take me back to (or remain within) the browser. It just seems easier and more natural to remain within the same “space.” For those of us who mistrust, or are ambivalent about, the cloud, this is a resistance that needs to be overcome.

*I could also perform here a Richard-Stallman-like privacy rant, but I shall spare you that affliction.