Do you know where your information is?

In which mmy uses the recent (and fortunately short) disappearance of The Slacktiverse website as a teaching moment.

Last night (Thursday July 28) The Slacktiverse website disappeared for several hours from the world of cyberspace. The problem (the site had been accidentally flagged as a spam blog by a program designed to filter spam out of the system) was fixed after a few hours and the website was up and running again in time for mmy to go to bed late and have nightmares about missing data.

During the time that the website was down a number of people emailed TBAT concerned, among other things, as to whether we had copies of everything on the site and it was only later that I realized that I had misled them as to the situation. In answer to the questions as to whether TBAT had a complete copy of the website I responded that we were missing the last few weeks Most things we have copies off line but there hasn't been an entire website mirror done for a while since we were having space issues. In the cold light of morning I realize that there were a lot of unspoken (?unwritten?) presumptions in my answer so let me clarify a few things.

If the website was to go down for some reason the only thing that, at any time, would be lost would be the comments on the most recent articles. At all times TBAT has copies of any piece that has been published on the site. Unfortunately the problems at the other end of Fred's transfer to another website have left us hosting posts published over a period of almost eight years as well as all the comments to those posts. This, and the interface we are working with, makes short, snappy and frequent backups difficult. However, nothing written for publication on The Slacktiverse is at risk of being lost.

However, this does give me an opportunity to remind all of our readers out there of some important rules of information storage and retrieval.

• Have more than one copy of anything that is important to you.
• Have those copies stored in different places
• Have copies stored, if possible, on different platforms/media
• Check the integrity of the archive/backup/storage on a regular basis otherwise you may find that you have been relying on archived material that has already suffered from significant deterioration

Do not be like my colleague who, when his hard drive died, lost every single picture he had ever taken of both of his children. Do not, like the student who arrived crying in my office, have the thesis you have been working on for over a year stored in only one place. Thumb drives die. Hard drives die. Computers die. Systems fail. Your online webmail provider can accidentally delete years of email. The machine you use at work may be swapped out or "cleaned" while you are on vacation/ill.

Several years ago I went over to the computer store the day my hard drive appeared to decide to reformat itself. Files disappeared before my eyes and when the process was over the only thing that remained on my computer were the many pictures I had of my cats (make of that what you will.) The technician interrupted my explanation of the phenomenon with the comment you have a backup of everything important don't you? The tip-off, zie told me later, was the fact that I was not in hysterics.

So, make sure that you have multiple copies of anything that is important to you. In multiple places. This includes everything from the stories you are writing to important information and pictures that are irreplaceable.

Remember, digitally stored information is at risk for degradation and loss just as is information stored in other forms.

Questions for your consideration

1. How many of the things which are important to you are not backed up or duplicated elsewhere?
2. Given the dependence so many of us have on the web should we be at least as worried about identity disappearance as we are of identity theft?

--mmy

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Comments

[Rachel McG]

I was wondering what had happened to the blog, but I figured everything was backed up and would re-appear shortly, such is my faith in the TBAT. :)

That said, I do have multiple backups of all my stuff -- I have it all on flash drive that I back up frequently, and I also mail new docs I create to myself at a gmail account I set up for the purpose. I could probably do more, but this seems emough. Is it?

[Josh Enigma (the Transhumanist)]

Once upon a time, I had something like 6 flashdrives. I still have five of those flash drives, but the 6th broke on me (the doohickey on the end snapped off. Thankfully, it wasn't in the USB port when it did it.)

Well, I always back up my information on stuff. I backup my backups. To say I'm paranoid of losing my novels is a fair accusation (I've had hard-drives split frag, reformat, become infected with viruses that make them crash and burn, Windows has decided it doesn't like something I was working on and deleted it, I must've decided I didn't like something I was working on and deleted it only to try and find it later and fail, etc.) Well, I keep my information on one of the five flashdrives. Perhaps tellingly, I keep all five of those flashdrives stored inside of a single storage unit about the size of a pocket dictionary I have with me at all times.

When asked if it doesn't seem counter productive that I do that, my response was usually: "No, it's not, because I know where they're all at. If I lose one, that's fine. The same stuff is backed up on all of them, and I'll never lose unit."

Well, that's true. I've never lost that unit.

Somehow, I managed to lose all of the flashdrives in there instead.

Don't ask me how that happened because I don't have a clue. All I know is that I opened it one day and all of my flashdrives were gone. Thankfully, I found them all, and I still tell the story jokingly with my friends.

Also, I still keep all my flashdrives except for one inside of the container. The reason I don't keep that one in the container? I can't find it anymore, because it's not in the container (but I know it's around here somewhere).

[Josh Enigma (the Transhumanist)]

That last paragraph should read like this:

Also, I still keep all my flashdrives except for one inside of the container anymore. The reason I don't keep that one in the container anymore? I took it out so I didn't lose it like I lost it before, and now can't find it, because it's not in the container (but I know it's around here somewhere).

[Sixwing]

You rock for having that kind of an archive. I remember trying to keep up with a modest phpBB setup, keeping archives offsite. Even that was a test. I don't want to imagine doing it with a site this big.

Thanks also for the reminder that I need to do some backups this weekend. ^^;

When I was in college, I used to carry a USB drive around my neck on a chain and back it up to my desktop approximately daily, but I've gotten out of the habit. I should find a submersible thing to carry, because the number of times in a given year that I end up in one of the local bodies of water is nontrivial.

[Rachel McG]

I know this is completely off topic, or mostly, but I need some help finding webcomics. The backstory is this: I moved from one laptop to another about 6 months ago, but, to the topic at hand, forgot to tranfer my "favorites" folder before the original laptop crapped out. Now I can't find the list of awesome webcomics I had compiled from Slacktiminions' suggestions. I can remember a couple of them, like Girl Genius, but not many of the others. I've spent bunches of time trawling through lists of comics and even awards lists and such, but can't find some of the comics I really loved.

I'm hoping you'all can help by re-rec'ing some of your faves, which I'm sure were some of my faves, too.

Please?

[aravind]

@Josh, see, I started out with that, but then I began to worry, "What if something happens to the safe spot where I have all the backups?"

Now I have two safe spots...

[MercuryBlue]

...yeah, now'd be a good time to get back to the 'convince the computer there's actually a drive there' project so's I can back everything up onto said drive and then take said drive upstairs, wouldn't it.

[Josh Enigma (the Transhumanist!)]

@ Rachel McG - here's two I usually read.

Gunnerkrigg Court is a really, really good one:
http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=1

Dr. McNinja is another good one:
http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/0p1/

[Mary Kaye]

Someone once sold me a laptop with internal hard drive mirroring, so that if anything happened to hard drive 1 everything would still be recoverable from hard drive 2.

Someone broke into my house and stole the laptop. It had the only copy of the last three chapters of my novel on it. Of course, both hard drives went together!

I am still bad about backups, but I am trying to improve. Rewriting is so painful--you never feel as though you capture everything that was good about the first draft. (On the occasions when I've later found the first draft, sometimes that is true and sometimes it's not; but it always *feels* true.)

[Mmy]

@Mary Kaye: A friend of mine emailed the entirety of her dissertation to MmySpouse as she wrote it for fear that (to quote her) an asteroid struck the university server that held the backup of her work. Since MmySpouse lived in another country she felt that it would be a safe backup.

Some suggestions for backups -- Idrive (at Idrive.com) gives 2 gigs of free backup space to anyone and the backups can be scheduled to run automatically (warning -- watch out for backup systems that overwrite old files. What you are looking for is a backup service that allows you access to old iterations.) Zoho allows for storage as well as google. Dropbox can be useful for archiving files.

Just make sure that all of your copies are not functionally in the same place.

[Mike Timonin]

Thanks for the reminder - I have just backed up the various threads of my dissertation. I was very very lucky earlier this month that I was able to get the documents off of my laptop, which has partially died (it was freezing up after booting - couldn't click on anything, and the clock stopped, and it would sit like that for hours, not turning on the screen saver or anything, only a hard reboot stopped it). I've since restored the laptop to factory settings (which is totally useless) and it's semi-functional - but I've got all the documents in three other places now.

[Rachel McG]

Thanks, Josh!

[Mike Timonin]

Rachel McG- if you go to my blog (linked below) and scroll down below the "Slactivist Blogs" on the left, you'll find my webcomic list. Well, actually, that's true for anyone - it's not like I've set it up so that only Rachel can see it, that would be silly.

[P J Evans]

I have an external drive that I use for backup.

(Mike, I have the first of the 150-years-ago-today posts up. Link in my name....)

[kisekileia]

I use an external drive for backup, but I need a second backup outside my home.

[Brin]

I don't have a dedicated thumb drive, so I use my Sansa (MP3 player) and attached microSD card instead, with a copy on both the Sansa and the microSD*. There's a copy on the family desktop that isn't updated as often: once every month or two, rather than once every update to the main collection or two (which can range from daily to every three weeks, depending on how much I've been doing with it). Also one copy on the email account under my legal name and one on the Brin account.

There was one Friday morning in mid-2009 when I tried to turn my computer on and nothing happened. I talked to Dad-the-Computer-Veterinarian, who suspected it was a motherboard fault. We brought it to a professional computer vet, who confirmed this and told us it would cost 1.5 times as much to repair it than it would to buy an entire new laptop. I had a full document backup at the time, so all I lost was my Nethack save-game (which I wasn't too upset about).
The same thing happened to Brother last week. Apparently he didn't have a backup because he had little-to-nothing worth backupping.

All of this reminds me, I've made one diary entry and one or two dream journal entries** since last update. I should go fix that.

*Bearing in mind that I almost never leave the house without it. This is partly because of its musical properties but mostly because it comforts me to keep my diary close, even if I can't actually access it without a USB-capable computer. I also leave it on my bedside table*** when I go to bed, to soothe paranoia about suddenly needing to flee the house in the middle of the night.

**Which are themselves copied from the original pen-and-paper. I don't write by hand much, but I find paper is more conducive to capturing dreams than stuff with backlights.

***I have a loft bed, but the closet behind my bed has a storage shelf at a very convenient height.

[Rachel McG]

Mike: That was very helpful. I found several of my favorites on your list!

[Ross]

This is one place where having a complicated network helps you out. My media is stored on RAID arrays to reduce the chance of loss due to hardware failure, though I still worry a lot about catastrophic failures. My personal documents get automatically backed up daily to a drobo, and my wife's started migrating her own documents to a drive that's in the backup set. I used to do a weekly secondary backup to a pair of hard drives that I rotate in and out of the fire safe, but that's the step in the chain I've been getting lazy about.

A colleague of mine decided to leverage broadband, and placed an old computer with a USB hard drive at his parents' house, plugged into their DSL with instructions to Just Leave It Alone, and had scripts set to send a backup of his critical files there weekly. I've been contemplating doing the same.

I've lost exactly one hard drive in the past decade. But it was an important hard drive, and a lot of stuff was lost forever -- including the source code to a game I'd been developing for a couple of years (I had a year-old backup, and was able to recover about 80% of what I'd lost by decompiling a tester copy). It's left me with a mild sense of dread ever since, including a suspicion that increases over time that I'm "due".

[Kit Whitfield]

I regularly e-mail myself updated drafts of whatever fiction I'm working on. Since it's stored on a free site, I figure it's at least burglar-proof.

[Mike Timonin]

PJ, that's awesome! I forgot that you were going to do that, thanks for remembering to tell me.

Rachel - glad I could help.

[Dav]

I need to get better organized about this. There *are* backups of my work in different places. And they are sort of labeled. But I'd like something a little clearer as to when they were backed up and what they replace.

[Phoenix]

I regularly e-mail myself updated drafts of whatever fiction I'm working on. Since it's stored on a free site, I figure it's at least burglar-proof.

I do this too but Mmy's post has me worried now... what if something happens to my email account?

*fingernailbite*

[Dragoness Eclectic]

I came up from the very early days of personal/mini- computing, back when random power outages could scramble the data on your 8" floppy disks. I've seen websites come and go... how many Geocities sites can you find now?

Back up anything you can't afford to lose.

Note for Programming 1001 students: when the TA in your computer lab (me) says, "Save your work frequently, we have power outages", she isn't joking. Back when I was a grad student at a certain southern college, the summer thunderstorms regularly knocked out the power to the building where the freshmen computer lab was. For some reason, certain students didn't pay attention to my warnings until the first time they lost several hours of work. (Some did, and were really glad they did save regularly).

Note for small company Vice Presidents: when your computer programmer/technical expert on the company's specialized software (my spouse) tells you, "Back up your data before I install this new OS", he means it. Really. Because part of installing that new OS involves re-formatting the drive. With your data on it. To his credit, after his data went bye-bye, the VP did admit that, yes, he'd been warned to back it up, and hadn't bothered because he was so confident in my spouse's skills that he didn't think anything would go wrong. Unfortunately for him, nothing went wrong; the right procedure erased his data. Whoops.

[Mmy]

@Dragoness Eclectic: And when the IT internet expert tells the Board of Directors that the college (located miles away from a city of any size) needs to have a backup connection to the internet in case the line goes down--BELIEVE HIM.

Else your internet line may be cut by a catastrophe with a tractor, a tree and a barn the day before your seniors are to register for times to write the MCAT -- and the internet may remain down for the better part of week just as you are trying to recruit new students.

Note 1: I had an aircard in my laptop and thus could get to the internet. This drove people crazy.

Note 2: I spent an entire class drawing charts/maps on the board to explain to a group of "computer generation" college students why they could still email each other WITHIN the college's intranet but couldn't get outside to the world of the internet.

[Pthalo]

Rachel:

XKCD -- geeky comics

Dilbert -- comics about cubicle life

Hyperbole and a half -- i don't even know how to describe this, but there was a cute one about a dog

A Magical Roommate -- about a girl in a magic kingdom whose mother was from our world who comes to our world for college

Those are the ones I follow

[Brin]

I wouldn't have thought of Hyperbole and a Half as a comic, but I can see your point. Whatever it is, it's great.

[Rachel McG]

Oh, I love Hyperbole and a Half! Yeah, it's not really a comic, more of a blog, but it is indeed very funny. Thanks for your input, Pthalo.

[Laiima]

Another lover of Hyperbole and a Half here!