Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
So, I've had my first irreversible and total loss of a hard drive, the contents of which I've been criminally bad at making backups of. At this stage, I should be preaching the gospel of the Frequent Backup and wov to follow it religiously for the rest of my days, right?
Right?
Weeell ... I guess this came at a "good" time, because my main realisation so far has been that there isn't a whole lot of stuff on my computers that I really can't bear losing. It would have sucked on a grand scale to lose my whole music collection, but with the iPod and all the apps out there on the net I was confident from the start that I wouldn't need to lose it. My address book and calendar were/are well synched with both mobile and iPod as well, so no real panic there either. All recent schoolwork was either available somewhere else if I really needed it or finished and not terribly missed.
What I did lose forever was a bunch of files in my home directory. A bunch of photos that I may or may not be able to find elsewhere to begin with. Then there was some stuff in my websites folder that I don't think was uploaded anywhere, small experiments with existing sites only, nothing large. Then there's the rest of the images folder, which doesn't hurt too much either. It would have been much more of a pain if I'd had the time to get really good and creative with my drawing board ... Finally, there's all the non-school stuff in the documents folder. Not only a few passwords to things I don't access too frequently, but also plenty of random writings on a wide variety of subjects. I can't think of anything specific that I really miss, but this is the main source of the feeling that there are things I can't remember right away that I'll really miss when I do. It wouldn't have used much space to do a regular backup of either, so that's probably something I'll look seriously into in the future.
Such is life in the digital age. But yes, I will probably be better at backups in the future ...