And I'm just a dumb boiler-maker / welder.
It seems absurd to me that anyone with half a technical clue wouldn't use some kind of off-device / off-sit backup.
Lots of people with technical clue's are also lazy as fuck about doing uninteresting work like setting up proper backups. Also somewhat paranoid about putting backups on other peoples infrastructure like dropbox (especially unencrypted).
I just wish affordable tape drives never disappeared.
I'm a bit at a loss for words to be honest.
I don't know if the guy whose dog ate his homework actually did the homework.
But I know that as a system administrator/security analyst I've had to push back HARD against some really stupid the things the development team wanted to do. And I'm sure the development team thought I was stupid for requiring things like auditable artifacts, limited permissions for developers, and daily backups. They wanted to push out code as quickly and easily as possible.
Knowing tech doesn't necessarily mean adhering to the platonic ideal of 'computer best practices.' This is actually the root cause of most security breaches.
...plus, the family pictures you had on your personal laptop are probably worth a lot more than a lot of the code out there that isn't being backed up. ;)
I will say this: box.net's webdav support is quite useful if you want cloud storage without a client like Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. I have having a background process constantly running just so I can keep up to date files that never change, and that I either don't need locally (backups) or are too large to want multiple copies of (CD images), or get locked/constantly modified (browser profile).
Except Dropbox has stopped supporting encrypted linux filesystems, and Box doesn't support Linux.
>It seems absurd to me that anyone with half a technical clue wouldn't use some kind of off-device / off-sit backup.
For most technical people I know, having data on an unencrypted disk is unacceptable. They wouldn't accept a scenario where a thief steals their laptop and simply has access to all their files. They wouldn't accept that risk just because a convenient "backup" service suddenly stopped support. They'll simply back data up another way.
I don't know what the lay of the land is for Mac/Windows users.
As I say, these services are as useful as the services they replaced 15 years ago from my perspective.
I fail to see where in my comment was anything related to "MacOS using encrypted linux filesystems" which, as of itself as a sentence, is confusing.
My comment's parent was explaining that anything worth keeping was worth backing up, and how easy it was to set up back-up even for someone with the commenter's skill level, using services like Dropbox.
My comment was explaining that certain users who have encrypted filesystems on Linux cannot use Dropbox, for Dropbox stopped supporting them around November 2018, which makes Dropbox unusable for these users who have to come up with back-up schemes excluding Dropbox or Box.
BTW Dropbox works fine under linux, just not in all setups.
That's great that you have 5GB (or less) of backup-worthy data.
For anyone else like you, that's the simple and happy solution that solves the problem well enough, and you're done.
What about if you have more than 5GB? What about if you have privacy concerns? What if your offsite backup is an offline backup and you can't access it due to a pandemic restricting access and travel?
All of the above impacted me and my ability to keep my backups going, and I've had to think about how to rebuild my backup strategy, as I've lost access to the remote site where my offline backup disks are stored.
Doing small backups is easy if you just want another copy somewhere else.
Doing bigger backups on a long term sustainable basis for large amounts of data with privacy requirements is less easy.
Anyway, you deserve a cookie for having done a backup at all. You're doing better than many.
Most of the stuff I produce is random garbage that isn't worth keeping. There's a good chance that this guy didn't think he had anything particularly interesting or worth keeping. Once you feel you understand how the app works, you don't really need the work you put into figuring it out anymore.