It only takes a minute of your time to copy your important files to a drive or the cloud. I (potentially) lost one year of progress on a book I'm writing because of my negligence.
So please don't be like me.
Can't stress this enough, especially if you're a server operator! Any data that doesn't exist in at least 2 different places should be considered volatile. Also keep in mind that the "cloud" is just someone else's computer and shouldn't be used for backup, since you have no control over it and it requires a working Internet connection to access it. Better to get an external USB 3 drive with enough capacity to fit all your most important files; They're relatively cheap (especially HDDs) and last a long time (my personal one that I got years ago has 48524 hours on it as I'm typing this and it's still perfectly fine).
You're right. I have both local and online options so I maximise the chances of file safety but my work is the only thing I didn't make a recent backup thereof, even though it's the easiest thing to backup out of my files.
It only takes a minute of your time to copy your important files to a drive or the cloud.
I’ve been waiting for four days now for a couple hundred thousand of my files to finish uploading to a back‐up service. It still isn’t done.
Oh dang, thanks for that! I haven't backed up my major projects in months.
Be careful who you back up with, as well, if you live in a country that could potentially get sanctioned by the US i.e. if you live outside the US.
I recommend for writing that people make frequent versioned copies as well. For example after some amount of pages or time spent I'll copy the file itself and rename it <filename>_backup<date> to try and protect against corruption that happens to part of the file without being noticed and just to have the option of rolling back to a previous iteration or at least looking at it. It can clutter things up a little but if you like you can put the backups in their own folder somewhere. Though this is obviously no substitute for backing up to another device as this method doesn't protect you against your storage device failing, suffering corruption, malware, etc so it's more important to do that.
Sorry this happened to you OP.
I’ve never really thought about it outside of the context of code, but I wonder if Git would be handy for this. Plain text and markdown would work perfectly, but there might be better version control systems for things like Office/LibreOffice.
My Raspberry Pi sd card failed in a not immediately obvious way, luckily I had a backup and it actually helped me restore most important stuff almost right away. Just fresh image, copy the stuff and it works.
Highly recommend setting up syncthing on at least 2 devices. Then you never have to worry, as it's automatic.
I would do that except I looked at prices for external drives and they’re fecking expensive.
It's funny (or tragic?) because I have syncthing and did not bother sync my work. Only thought about it in retrospect.
It's not as good as a proper backup solution but it's definitely much better than nothing.
It really depends on how many devices you're talking about. Two is infinitely better than zero, but not ideal. If you've got several devices at several locations syncing files, I don't see how that's much worse than a cloud service. And amazon can't look at my Weiner pics that way.
(I'm kidding, of course. Making Jeff Bezos see my hog is a feature of AWS, not a defect.)
One problem with it is that deleting a file in Syncthing may also delete it on other machines. And a backup solution will keep multiple versions of old files which can be lifesaving if you make a bad edit.
Sorry to hear that. You are not the only one who had to learn it the hard way :/
It's even harder the second time... I should stick to ink and paper.
That’s utterly miserable. What happened? Would it be at all possible for a professional to dig through the deep dark of your computer to try and find any remnants of the file/files you lost?
There might be a chance that it hasn’t been overridden yet or might be hiding in a place a regular person wouldn’t think to look.
I wish you luck though, it’s awful that happened to you.
Laptop stopped working, it reeks of burned smell. I don't know if extracting the data is even an option since the device has no HDD but instead a tiny chip soldered onto the motherboard.
It's completely my fault, I should've known better.
so what you're telling me is that i need to back that thang up?
