this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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It's World Backup Day again. Good opportunity to check if your backup mechanisms work as intended.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In a life before a TBI and subsequent seizure condition robbed me of a functioning brain, I actually ran the IT dept for a company which I worked for as a mech eng, estimator, designer, and project manager. This one gentleman who was a field super and his wife had been trying for years to have a child. They finally did after many miscarriages and rough times, and as you can imagine, they took so many pictures of their baby. He called me one day in a panic about his computer and so I rushed over to his house. Long story short, his HDD had suffered a major crash for whatever reason, and everything was gone. No backups of his baby pictures, nothing. I sent the HDD off to see what could be recovered, but apparently it everything was toast.

Even tho it wasn't my pictures, it hurt me to my core, that all these pictures and memories this man and his wife had accumulated, were gone forever. It really did a number on me and I think about it from time to time even tho that has been decades ago.

Make backups folks. It might take you the better part of a Saturday afternoon to get everything backed up and secure, but do it anyways.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@irmadlad Yes, and keep a copy offsite! A good friend’s house burned down in the recent Eaton Canyon fire. He and his family lost absolutely everything. Photos, letters, memorabilia — the story of their lives. A devastating loss. He had plenty of backups, but none stored elsewhere and the ones in his house were also thoroughly toasted. Friends are working to find copies of photos, but that is just a fraction of what was lost.

It isn’t hard to do backups, just a chore. I by a thumb drive every few months. A few terabytes is not too expensive and it is small. I backup to it and mail it to a family member. I know it is safe. Daily backups are better but more cumbersome. I back up weekly to hosted disk drives at a small Internet service provider.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It isn’t hard to do backups, just a chore

Right, and since now we have devices that can store thousands of pictures and data, and SSD cards that do the same, people tell themselves, maybe later, later, later until later catches up with you and you loose everything. It's been at the end of last year, but my lady friend was riding my ztr and her phone fell out of her pocket. Next thing I saw was iphone bits blasting out from under the mower deck. Now luckily, I am very fastidious at backing up her phone, but shit happens and I've always been one who adhered to the 3-2-1 rule. In fact, on my daily driver computers, the only thing that is on their HDD is the OS, and maybe a app or two that I wanted to check out. They really are like thin clients. Otherwise, everything goes to storage and that is backed up daily.