Data.
What data do I consider important?
I had a backup scare a while ago, thinking I’d lost several years’ worth of photographs. It looks like I did have some level of backup, but not all of them were retrieved.
So I suppose Photographs are one thing I feel I need to backup. What else?
Files?
What kind of files am I even thinking of, I wonder? I haven’t tried to write any short stories for years, and spreadsheets I created with Sarah to do things like plan chores don’t really seem backup worthy.
Personal projects, I suppose would count, so that would be the various little programming projects I’ve started and abandoned in the last decade.
My university work, and most importantly my 3rd year project. I worked hard on that, and even if it’s unlikely I’ll be ever doing anything with it again, it would be a shame to lose it.
Music
I’ve got a lot of music files. A lot of these are ripped from CDs, and from my Parent’s CDs. Some of these are files I recorded from records, some are things I was given by friends, some of it is Sarah’s. Replacing the actual files would be a pain in the arse, re-ripping everything would take several days of solid work, and some of the CDs are in poor enough shape that I’m not sure they’d rip again anyway.
Videos
I’ve made a few videos, just short personal things mostly. Most of these are on Youtube anyway, since that was the primary mechanism I was sharing things with friends anyway. But if I should lose my Google account, or google went under or something (not that it’s likely to happen).
Paranoia
A long time ago, a member of family asked me if I still liked Google. This was just after Google had started to really take off with their suite of applications, and Google Mail had started to become such a mainstream player.
At the time, they were poking fun at my anti-Microsoft attitude and my dislike of massive IT companies. They were right to do so; I was probably the kind of person to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign.
But as the years have gone on, it’s difficult to ignore that Google (Alphabet) has become a deeply scary company.
Even if they weren’t, it’s probably pretty foolish to have so much of my identity tied to a single service, and it’s also amazingly foolish to keep any important information in a free online service. I know, since I’ve been that fool before: when Hotmail addresses were migrated to outlook.com addresses, any “inactive” accounts were purged of all old emails if no-one log in via web browser happened within a number of days. I’d had that email address 10 years, and suddenly everything on it was gone. It’d be daft to assume that Google never ever EVER has that kind of thing happen.
So, I suppose I’m a tech version of a prepper. There might already be a word for that, not sure. Hopefully I won’t be suspected of being a new Unabomber or anything.
So, my data.
Backup solution.
The saying goes “3 copies, 2 mediums, 1 off site backup”. Currently, as of writing, I have one “master” copy on my NAS, but that’s only got a single hard drive in it. This means it barely qualifies as a NAS at this point. Sure, it’s storage attached to the network, but only a fool would actually host data on it (Yeah I’m a fool).
A 2nd hard drive has been ordered and dispatched from some enormous warehouse, so soon that single hard drive will be mirrored, making me a bit less foolish.
Still, that’s only 1 medium. I’ll need to think a bit about what might constitute a 2nd medium.
The off-site backup is going to be handled in 2 ways. First of all, I’ve subscribed to Crash Plan. I’ve not actually uploaded any data to it yet, since it’s been a bit tricky to set up on FreeNAS. This will be my cloud backup for now, although I’m open to switching cloud backup providers at any point.
The 2nd off site back up will be a similar NAS box running at my parents’ house. I’ll dedicate some time to getting that set up when I visit them at Christmas. It can store their data, and I’ll rsync my data to it, and their data to mine.
The Paranoid bit
Well, I don’t think it’s really paranoia. But I’m not going to be entrusting anything more to Google from now on, and I need to apply that retroactively to their services. This means I will need to get down from their servers everything I’ve ever uploaded, and also take a copy of every email I’ve ever sent or received through their services. This will all go into my backups as well.
I will also need to remove any DRM from any ebooks or films or music I’ve ever bought from them too. This might be a bit tricky.
Of course, this won’t happen overnight. I’ve already begun migrating my emails away from Google, but I still use them as my primary contact for a lot of online services. Amazon for example, uses my Gmail login. I suppose I want to get things that are actually irreplaceable away from them, so that would mean family and friends can have my non-gmail related account, and all of the faceless companies that want my email address for spurious reasons can have the gmail one. In this fashion, I will fill my gmail inbox with SPAM.