Every few years I have a panic about losing everything, and in a flurry of activity, I buy hard drives, blank DVDs, and subscriptions to cloud storage services. Then, because I am a geek, I concoct incomprehensible command-line scripts to perform backups. I write commands in a jumble of slashes, colons, and letters:
robocopy "D:\" "H:\D" /MIR /FFT /R:3 /W:10 /Z /NP /NDL
Even as I’m writing these, I’m aware that I will have no idea what they do in a day’s time, let alone when I next come to look at them, years later, in a backup-induced panic. And yet, every time, I fall into the trap of thinking that the more complex and impenetrable the backup, the better the backup. This is flagrantly false and doesn’t stand up to the tiniest bit of scrutiny, but still, I feel satisfied with a good day’s backing up, even if I haven’t backed up any actual, you know, data.
The Internet Is Only Permanent When You Don’t Want It to Be
Why everything is online forever. Except when it’s not.
The problem with backing up is that it is work you don’t want to ever use. You hope the effort will be wasted. When we talk of backing up, we refer to “redundant” systems—literally, systems that are superfluous. And usually, when something is superfluous, you try to get rid of it. But to back up something, a redundant copy is not redundant. The very words for describing backups drive us in logical circles.
Backing up is time-consuming. It requires thought, it requires effort, and it requires money. You need to put your backed-up data somewhere, whether that’s a cloud service you pay monthly for or a hard drive that you tuck away somewhere. These things cost.
More than that, backing up is boring. It has a dull, worthy feeling to it—the digital equivalent of eating your vegetables, meditating for an hour, and going to bed at 10. How many of us, really, want to spend time backing up our data? We know we should, but we get no immediate benefit from it. Like all tasks with indeterminate benefits at some point in the future, it requires effort to motivate ourselves. File it next to upgrading the OS, reviewing the privacy policy, and updating the antivirus (or contributing to a 401(k) and reducing carbon emissions). Who would have thought that backing up would be such an apt metaphor for the failures of the modern world?
Like all things that are good for you, you’re probably backing up wrong. “Backing up to a hard drive that is six inches away from your computer is #notabackup,” programming expert Scott Hanselman writes. In fact, even backing up isn’t a backup. You need “three copies of anything you care about — two isn’t enough if it’s important,” Hanselman adds. Plus, he suggests different formats: “Dropbox+DVDs or Hard Drive+Memory Stick or CD+CrashPlan.” And one of those needs to be off-site. This is starting to sound like a lot of work. Maybe I don’t care about my pictures of loved ones that much.
#computers #data #social-media #technology #backing-up #data science
