Consider this a PSA.

If you’re not backing up your computer, for the love of insert preferred religious figure do it now. Seriously, bookmark this or something, go do it, and come on back. The Internet will still be exactly where you left it.

Jeez, c'mon - rumour (read: twitter) has it that adam2z, a creative guy, isn’t backing up his stuff. What the hell is this? It makes me cringe knowing that a simple hard drive failure would screw over so many hours of work. Buy an external hard drive, plug it in, and at the very least, drag your stuff over to it. Move on to more complicated solutions like offsite or bootable if you can be bothered, but do something. Cost can’t be blamed anymore - if you can afford a computer (the absolute cheapest of which is £300), you can afford a £60 external hard drive.

What makes me really nervous is that there are seriously simple “consumer” solutions like Apple’s Time Machine, but even the computer-savvy people I know aren’t doing anything. How does the rest of the world stand a chance?

Comments

By Chris N on 21 January 2008 at 00:52:

Hard Drive failure isn’t always the end of the world; there’s a fair amount of software solutions (SpinRite especially is meant to work really well) and if you’re really hard-core, even a completely dead hard-drive can sometimes be hacked into to get spinning again (if only for a while). But yes, on the whole, backups are generally a good practice.

By adam2z on 21 January 2008 at 02:43:

you can link it! ive unprotected for a reason. http://twitter.com/adam2z/statuses/621213602

an external hdd is on my ‘to buy’ list. as long as i can use time machine and use it as a regular media dump. which im sure i can now that ive written it.

oh and this might aggravate you beautifully. http://www.smashourstuff.com/

By William M on 21 January 2008 at 08:17:

I really need to back-up my USB key but do I? No because of the inbuilt phobia of the effort required to back up.

By Alex Muller on 02 February 2008 at 22:39:

Adam: Cheers, and that site makes me cringe :)

Plus, sorry for only just noticing these (and thanks to Chris for the tip…)

Pretty rubbish of me on my own site, I know

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I posted this on Sunday, January 20, 2008 at 20:41, under Technology.