PSA: Back Up Your Shit | Hacker News Reader

PSA: Back Up Your Shit

jwz.org

242 pointsmfincham127 comments

I think that the beauty of Snapchat is that it frees you from this ridiculous notion that a text, IM, Facebook message, etc, has any value.

In my opinion, it doesn't. Also, in my opinion, I believe that feeling the need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense of self-worth, and that everything you say has value and needs to be saved.

I never, ever peruse through my messages, to reminisce over an old conversation. It's too much navel-gazing to suit my sense of pride. What actually matters is the actual relationship you have with a person, which is built on the BODY of IMs, messages, conversations, visits, dinners, parties, etc, that you shared with that person. Sometimes, it's best to leave good conversations in the blurry past, and just remember that a certain person is funny, a great conversationalist, etc.

I'm doing the same sort of thing with Google now. I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. When we talk, it's about whatever resides in our own brains, be it good, bad or ugly. The entertaining part of any conversation is the actual conversation, the passion, the humor, etc. If all we wanted to do was pass around facts, then we can forward each other URLs and be done with it. When I'm talking with someone over dinner, we're not hammering out a contract that requires precision, we're having a conversation over ideas, and as funny as it sounds, facts aren't as important as the spirit of the conversation. Unless of course you're in an argument with someone, and then that isn't very much fun so why even bother starting the conversation in the first place.

Honestly, a lot of what you have to say make sense, it does... But then I remember that I still have the emails my wife exchanged almost ten years ago when we first met - and occasionally I do look back at those. And I fall in love with her all over again.

And then there are the random musings from friends who have died or any of a dozen other, slightly less big deal reasons to look back -- and I realize that in fact, those old conversations do matter, to me, often in unpredictable ways.

Your mileage may well vary, but I'd be truly sad if I lost those bits of history. Moreover, I wish I had access to that sort of an archive from my parents or grandparents... So maybe it'll be interesting to my kids. Maybe not. But the thing is, I don't know what's really going to matter and when disk space (on this scale especially) is a so cheap, it seems foolish not to save it.

> And I fall income with her all over again.

Glorious, glorious (auto-correct) typos! :)

Agree with this completely. My father died when I was 23. Being a digital packrat, I have every personal email I've ever sent or received. He wrote me quite regularly throughout college and I have all of those emails. All the life lessons and little bits of encouragement. My kids will never know their grandpa, but someday maybe we can share these together and they can learn a bit more about the kind of man he was in his own words, without my filter. They might also like some of the historically interesting ones like:

"Mike, check out this new store: http://www.amazon.com I think it's going to be popular. --Dad"

Very good point.

People may or may not tend to hoarding stuff. For those who do, though, hoarding bits sure is a lot easier than hoarding physical possessions.

That is one of the points from a book I read recently. His tech advice other than digital archiving was questionable, but all in all, a good read:

http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Minimalist-Life/dp/144955...

when disk space (on this scale especially) is a so cheap, it seems foolish not to save it.

This is the critical part for me. I delete the crap because it makes searching harder, but I currently spend $0.01/month backing up every email I've ever exchanged with my loved ones. Maybe I'll never need them, but at $1.20/decade, why would I not stash them? (It is, of course, all automated)

My fiance and I recently went through a bunch of our first emails and chat logs and laughed about it. The effort needed to keep this stuff is almost nil, so why not?

Most of my texts and facebook messages are about organizing things and referencing them saves me tremendous hassle on a regular basis.

This assumes you never talk about anything that actually matters. Having personal relationships and having fun are important, and technology can get in the way when overused, but if your conversations all have no lasting value you're missing out.

Yeah I totally agree, tbh I actually thought that article was a satire when I started reading it.

Until you need to look up that link for the mock ups for that client from 14 months ago, or that weird picture of your niece to bring to her birthday 7 years later.

The thing is that it costs nothing to keep this stuff. Throwing it out is a ritualistic digital seppuku. If you do it it is not for practical but for idealistic reasons. The practical thing is to save them and never look at them.

> I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone.

You must be a delightful dinner companion.

Fine, that's a cavil. This is not: Disk is cheap. My time is precious. It's a lot quicker and easier to just dump everything into a big greppable bucket, on the off-chance that five or ten years from now I might need to fish something out of it, than to spend hours or even minutes picking and choosing.

Of course, excepting a reimage after disk failure, the odds that I'll ever actually need to pull something out of my backups are low -- but if the dice ever come up snake eyes, I'll certainly be able to retrieve whatever it is I'm after, while doing things your way has the same low-but-nonzero chance of needing to go fishing, plus a nonzero chance of not being able to retrieve whatever it is because you didn't think it was worth backing up.

You present your attitude toward backups as originating in a need to suppress what must be an extraordinary susceptibility to a swelled head. May I suggest your efforts in that area are perhaps slightly less complete than you fancy them to be? But that's your problem to address, and of course you're free to take whatever chance you please, and waste however much time suits you, in pursuit of that admirable end. Me, I'll just keep shoveling everything into a big cheap bucket, on the off-chance I'll need to fish something out later on.

I feel your first sentence is unnecessary and more a meme than a reasonable answer.

Plus, people might consider NOT playing with your phone during dinner a really delightful thing. (My wife would be proud of me mentioning this, not that I tend to be that polite most of the time..)

You can play a game: everyone puts their phone in the middle of the table, the first person to pick theirs up during the meal pays the bill for the entire table (or split it if no-one does). There is another variant on this game that can be played with a goldfish bowl...

I'm glad no one I know plays this childish game, speaking as someone who is occasionally on call, lives under the conscious commitment to always pick up the phone when my wife calls, or maybe just likes to check the time every so often.

... And check your Facebook, and Instagram your food, and reply some email that actually will wait until the next day but you want your boss to see that you're "working" after hours, and maybe a bit of Twitter...

If you want to do all that, stay at home alone and do it on your PC. If you want to enjoy a meal in the company of friends, then try to live a bit more in the moment.

Yeah the thing is, I don't do all of that shit, which is why I would resent going out with friends who would treat me like a child. But I actually do have to answer my phone sometimes.

Sulking because you don't want to join in a game is the epitome of childish behavior. You might want to think about that.

Why are you trolling, kid?

Stop projecting your emotional state onto other people.

So he lists a couple of pretty reasonable reasons to have a phone (emergency contact/replacement for a wristwatch) and you immediately assume he's using Instagram instead? There are words to describe the kind of person you're being right now.

Yes, there are also words to describe seeing someone make a general point on the Internet and piping up why you are so special and unique that it doesn't apply. It's a game, nothing more. Snowflake.

Touchy, touchy! There's no need for insults.

I don't think I'm unique and special. A hallmark of a healthy marriage is that you're willing to drop everything if your spouse genuinely needs you, and lots of people are married. If you're a parent, you're going to drop everything if your children genuinely need you. Lots of people are on call in their professional lives.

To me, the biggest difference between childhood and adulthood is that adults have real responsibilities that are more important than silly games.

It's possible that's all you use your phone for at the table, but if you take a step back and observe, is that really all you use it for?

Do you look at that incoming email that isn't from the on-call address? Do you just check for new messages even when nobody is calling? Do you look at your twitter feed? Facebook? Just a quick check onto a favorite web site? Tap out replies to anything except on-call or your wife?

It could be that you're the exception - maybe you do only respond when you hear the special notification sound for your wife or the on-call originating address. I'm dubious - but that's colored by my own experience. I thought much the same of myself until I actually stopped and paid attention to what I was doing with my phone when around others.

When I'm on call all my pages come in over SMS so I'm generally only responding to alert sounds and only doing anything about it if it came from the pager gateway or my wife. Aside from phone and SMS I have all other notification sounds turned off. Unless it's my wife or a page I wouldn't even unlock the phone if I was genuinely spending time with people. The current time is on the lock screen so there's that.

A lot of times though, in a lunch-with-coworkers situation, we just run out of things to talk about and check our phones sometimes and that's okay.

Of course it's unnecessary; you may note that I called it a cavil, and a cavil is always unnecessary, which is part of what makes it a cavil. But it's to the point and sort of funny, which is why I left it in.

As for the rest, of course it's rude to be "playing with your phone" during dinner, and while it's sometimes necessary to initiate or answer some communication, to leave the table before doing so is only polite. But rudeness in response to rudeness is rudeness nonetheless, and justified only in the face of extreme provocation; such a minor impoliteness as the one we're discussing is far more pleasantly and effectively dissuaded by a polite response than a rude one -- something which, it seems to me, "I will disallow anyone..." evinces a certain failure to grasp.

" I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. "

If we are talking about something, (as opposed to just chatting around) I prefer when people look up facts they are unsure about. Especially if the alternative is guessing out of what they vaguely remember.

Do you feel the same way about the process of saving old letters from people? Because that practice has been going on for centuries.

So like a hundred years ago you would be saying, "Upon perusing my letters received via post, I always immediately incinerate them in the woodstove."

That's one way to live, I guess...

People keep letters?

Actually: people write letters?

It was pretty common for people to save letters in my parents' and grandparents' generation. When my grandmother died we found hundreds of them.

I went through a phase a few years ago where I actually wrote people letters. Since my friends are all over the globe, it sort of made sense. I did it because I personally liked the feeling of receiving a letter. The conclusion, after sending 20 letters to several people, was that receiving one is great but more often than not the person receiving it would thank me online and not write back on paper.

If there were a super-fast, cheap way to send paper letters, I'd communicate this way when it was anything personal.

> If there were a super-fast, cheap way to send paper letters

Don't they call that a "printer"?

More seriously, I haven't seen "Her", but isn't that the profession of its protagonist? -- hand-writing paper letters as a service, that is. Perhaps there's a market there, but I sort of doubt it; it seems to me that almost all the unique value of sending a hand-written letter would be absent in a case where the actual process of writing was farmed out to some random stranger.

The letter archives of people in history are a source of lots of useful historical information.

How do you think most of your history books were written?

People almost never write personal letters today, but yep, when it was common, people often kept them.

You're just excluding yourself from the pool of data that the future people have available when they archeologise our present day.

Please, think of them poor sods having to trawl through YouTube comments and the worst Reddit threads.

Is it impossible that people can have conversations that both: 1) are real and interesting conversations; but 2) are also improved by accurate facts? Some kind of "in the moment" banter where accuracy is irrelevant is fun sometimes, sure, but it's not the only mode of conversation, or to my mind the most interesting.

I have plenty of conversations that are both excellent conversations and come into necessary contact with facts. Sometimes the facts are purely from memory, but sometimes it's useful to look them up, if one or both of us aren't sure we remember them properly, or recognize a gap in our knowledge. A few topics in only the past week that benefited from looking up some facts: 1) talking with my parents about the circumstances under which my great-grandparents emigrated from Sweden; 2) discussing my uncle's MS treatment/management with family; 3) having a friendly argument with a friend about promising directions in artificial intelligence; and 4) discussing similarities and differences between some aspects of Danish and American culture.

It's not really a particularly new addition to conversation, either. Nowadays when you look something up it's probably on the internet, but when I was younger, conversations would sometimes involve pulling a reference book off the shelf to add some context or a point of reference to the discussion (atlases especially, but occasionally an encyclopedia or almanac).

> I believe that feeling the need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense of self-worth

> I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone

That whole deleting all communications to avoid over-inflated sense of self-worth thing? IT'S NOT WORKING.

> I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. (...) facts aren't as important as the spirit of the conversation.

I prefer my conversations to be both entertaining and factually accurate. I don't know why should we hold conversations to such low standards that facts doesn't matter. But then it's probably how gossips, urban legends and general bullshit-beliefs spread.

I do occasionally Google things on my phone while sitting with friends and family, usually not to fact-check, but to provide some immediate answers to questions raised (recent example - family discussing the Old Catholic Church; we had only vague understanding of their beliefs, and the conversation was significantly improved by me skimming and summarizing the Wikipedia article).

But my point is, how we're to reach the full extend of "extended mind" concepts, if people keep frowning upon using technological improvement in social contexts? It's as much with Googling stuff in a bar, as with the common hate toward Google Glass users. Some of the current social norms are IMO dumb and need to change.

Very interesting perspective. I like it. Our brains are also made to forget. People with hyperthymesia (autobiographical memory) are not better off remembering everything. So nature has fine tuned this system of engage and forget.

Thanks for this. The SMS export from iPhone is something I've been looking for. One of the most important relationships and experiences of my entire life has been documented (trapped) in my phone and it's backups ever since.

I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works, specifically whether it can pull photos/videos as well. If it doesn't yet but it wouldn't be too much trouble to add, I'd be willing to literally pay you to add that.

[Edit: Since a lot of the other comments are questioning the value of saving this stuff I figured I'd share my use cases. It turned out when I thought about it I have at least three:

1. I effectively met my wife on myspace (believe it or not a pretty nasty software bug led to our relationship) and an enormous amount of our initial friendship and courtship ended up documented there. Years ago I painstakingly clicked through for hours and copy-pasted the conversation to a text document.

2. I had a close friend die very suddenly and at a young age. My memory generally kind of stinks and I hated that there were conversations with him that I half-remembered. I went back through social media conversations with him (again, mostly on myspace) a lot in the years that followed. It helped me piece together memories that are very important to me now.

3. This past year my wife and I adopted our daughter. Our relationship with her birthmother has primarily been via SMS and the months that followed were a really exhausting and beautiful blur. It's really important to us that we're able to share that thread with our daughter someday.

In none of these cases did I see it coming that these services would end up having such valuable content in them for me. I didn't know I'd meet my wife. I'll never know when the last time I talk to someone is, and I would have never guessed that one of the most important things I'll have to give my daughter about her birth story is an SMS conversation.

So yeah, having access to this stuff is important to me. Thanks to jwz for pulling these resources together. ]

I lost my iPhone (had it stolen?) a few weeks ago along with several years of text messages, voice recordings, and notes from my best friend I had known since 5th grade who recently passed away. I had always planned to back it up or record it somehow but was only starting to get to it when I lost it. My greatest regret of 2013 is not backing up those texts, notes, voicemails, etc.. Back it up as soon as you can and don't put it off or you may regret it. Thankfully, I had backed up all our pictures over the years, and backed up that back up, but I would pay a lot of money to have that phone back.

As long as you plugged your iphone into your computer regularly with backups on, or joined your home wifi network while your computer was on the network with wifi backups on, it should still be in the backups, which would get loaded to your new phone if you loaded the new phone you bought from the most recent backup.

I had an iPhone 4 with iOS5 and an extremely old version of iTunes. It hadn't synced it in a long time as iTunes had stopped recognizing my phone. Further, windows on the computer I used to back it up on is now not booting at all. I have assumed that all my iPhone data, if any, would be on that computer unless it was saved in the cloud. Is that correct?

EDIT: I also unregistered my iPhone because I bought an S4 and couldn't receive texts from those with iMessage turned on, as their phones were still iMessaging me. Am I doomed?

You could potentially remove the hard drive from that computer, then put it in an external casing and hook it up to a new computer. Then research software to pull messages out of your old backups. You could potentially still salvage the messages, it sounded like they were old ones

If you can recover the iPhone backup files that iTunes created from the hard drive (such as via an external enclosure like unepipe mentions), you should be able to recover the messages contained within. Messages are stored in a SQLite DB within the backup (this is how jwz's script reads them).

Looks like iTunes on XP stores backups at this path: \Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\. That's the directory you need to recover from the hard drive.

Somehow I never considered this. Linux on my second partition actually boots up, so I can use my Linux OS to grab the files I believe. Thanks! I'll give it a shot!

If you search Github for "iphone sms" or "iphone messages", you can find lots of projects that will export your iPhone messages. So, if perl isn't your preferred language, there are plenty of other choices besides jwz's script.

I wrote an export script in Python that's fairly popular (200+ stars on Github): https://github.com/toffer/iphone-sms-backup

Unfortunately, I never did get around to exporting photos and videos.

Oh wow, awesome! Since python is my preferred language anyways I'll likely dig into this first.. since I'd be happy to toss you a pull request for sucking in images and video if feasible. Stoked to play with this later. Cheers.

What was the bug?

Coincidentally, before the friend I mentioned in #2 passed away we were out at a bar together and he was really interested in this girl who was there. They'd barely met and I guess he'd gone home and chatted with her on myspace. When I got up in the morning (he was living on my couch) he told me to go look at her profile. While cruising through his friends list I saw my now wife. I recognized her as being a friend of a friend I'd met months prior while we were both in a relationship. I pinged her surprised that her and my couch-surfing buddy were friends. They weren't. There was some sort of flaw in the rendering of my buddy's friends list and by the time we figured it out it had been resolved. That message started a really long conversation that led to our relationship. In fact I don't think we've gone more than a day or two without speaking since.

Hopefully the bug at least only allowed someone who was a friend of a friend (she was, just not my buddy's) to appear in the wrong list. Super sketchy if it was actually rendering complete strangers!

Regardless, I'm pretty sure if it wasn't for that bug I wouldn't be married to my incredible wife :)

That's quite funny. Deus Ex, perhaps? Congratulations of turning a glitch into something positive.

My previous iPhone is 4 years old(3GS, now I have a 5S), and I couldn't back up my texts because the backups are encrypted, and password-protected. I could swear I never put a password on them, but now I have no idea whether I really did or not. I don't know if it's something I can still extract off my old phone :(

"You don't just throw your letters in the trash. You might want them some day."

Maybe it's just me, but I actually /do/ throw my letters in the trash. I /do/ treat Twitter, etc. as ephemeral and passing. I don't care about saving those messages. Am I the only one?

I don't care about SMS, because it's mostly just my girlfriend asking what time my train gets in every day. But if I were ten years younger, it would totally make sense to save them, in the same way that I currently have archives of all my email and AIM conversations.

Nope. I too treat some conversations as ephemeral. Chats mostly fall in this category. Lengthy letters fall in a different category which is stored and backup.

Yeah, I don't save or back up anything; but I accept that I'm in the tiny minority. When I see how much anxiety it causes other people to have to keep track of their stuff, I'm thankful though.

Not at all. By default, all online conversations/letters/etc are trashed. Occasionally, if I have a technical conversation with somebody I will save it for reference. I may also save a letter from somebody if it has sentimental value.

Life is too short to be overly concerned with (most) old conversations/letters/etc. when you could be out engaging in new conversations and creating new memories.

Not at all. I suspect that I'd want to save:

- 50% of photos

- 5% of emails

- 1% of chats

- selective tweets and links I come across.

Definitely not everything.

But how do you know which n% ahead of time?

Nope. Unless it's something I need to keep around (taxes, insurance, usual "business of life" things,) I don't keep any of my email, messages, etc. for more than a few months at best. Nostalgia can prove to be an enemy of progress, and not having a lot of things to look back on keeps me focused on the future.

I have always treated IM and the like as phone calls. I don't keep tape back ups of every phone call I have ever made, once the conversation is over, no one should have a record of it. (in a perfect world this would include the communications provider and the NSA...but alas...)

No. But then I don't like taking pictures of myself and friends holding alcoholic beverages while grinning stupidly into the camera either, which I noticed is somehow popular.

I get text messages for all sorts things, such as calendar reminders, CC use, server jobs that have completed.

I was thinking to delete the CC and reminder messages, but then I thought it might be fun one day to do some self-archaeology and look back over them. "Oh, that's when I bought that book; Oh, yeah, I never went to that event. Wow, that long ago?"

I realize that this information is available in other places but the simple timeline of messages might make it interesting in some odd way.

Things like forum updates and twitter spam and such, I delete immediately, but everything else I save. Years and years of email for me adds up to about 20MB (compressed), minus pruning of attachments. 20MB is practically free, and who knows, I might want it some day.

> but I actually /do/ throw my letters in the trash

You still send and receive letters? Somebody sits down, puts pen to paper and writes a letter? Folds it, puts it in an envelope, adds postage, and mails it?

Outside of hokey "Christmas letters" (typed once, printed, and mailed to many), I haven't seen a real letter in many years.

I'd say I envy you, but then someone else would reply and tell me that if I like letters so much I should send one. And I suppose I should, but I know I won't. I'll send an e-mail.

In any case, if I got letters I wouldn't throw them in the trash.

> Somebody sits down, puts pen to paper and writes a letter? Folds it, puts it in an envelope, adds postage, and mails it?

------------------

I do. Largely because people use so few of the things. It doesn't get mixed in as a contact from some email address you've never seen before with 15-100 other emails that someone might get in a day.

If it's someone I know and correspond with regularly, then email, sure. Convenience takes precedence over distinctiveness in that case. But when I get a non-personal contact, for instance from a business or a friend of a friend asking about something, I still take the time to put the response on paper.

I feel oppositely. If someone sends me a letter, I consider it to be an unnecessary inconvenience. If they want a letter in return, that's almost asking too much. It feels rude. You're taking up my physical space and cluttering my home. You know what I get in the mail? Advertisements that get tossed into the dumpster on the way back to my apartment and physical notices of bills from companies that won't keep up with the times. If you send me a letter, you're placing yourself in the same categories.

I don't keep stamps around. I don't keep envelopes. It's the same as if someone wants me to give them a money order. I have to go out of my way to get one, when I could just as easily do a bank transfer or PayPal et al. My mailbox is a long walk from my apartment, and when I check my mail (once a week), it's all just advertisements addressed to "current resident".

So I guess the point is, don't assume a letter will be well received, especially by the younger generations living in apartments. I don't want you to call me, I especially don't want you to leave a voicemail, and for all that is holy, don't send me a letter.

Yes I did with my grandma until she passed a year and a half ago. I have about 2 of these letters but thats enough for me.

No. I find I'm happier when I let go of all of that stuff. Trying to hang onto everything just leads to stress and worry that I'm not managing to keep everything. Or that it's not perfectly organized, or that it's not adequately searchable.

Absolutely. Throw away as much as you can. > you want to save them forever Nope, very wrong.

It's not just you. My fear is opposite to the one the author describes: That by using these services, all these messages that I treat as ephemeral are actually being recorded forever, and 20+ years from now something I said offhand to a friend or a stranger will be used to embarrass or discredit me.

Unless you are a very prominent politician or on track to become one what do you care? I don't know... I more or less stand by what I have to say or I can honestly say that when I said it I was "young and stupid".

Social media account activity materially affects the prospects of many people who aren't politicians, especially if you engage in any controversial discussion. It's common for employers to name-search you and peruse your social media history, especially in careers that involve children like teaching, where naive new teachers are often terminated for putting child-inappropriate content on their public profiles, or getting linked to something they thought they'd shared anonymously.

"I was young and stupid" only works if the content in question is trivial or unimportant. If you happen to be on the opposite side of a political debate long since settled, you may end up getting yourself pwned pretty hard, even if you're not a politician.

Sure. However, then either watch what you say when using your real name or use a pseudonym. I don't always succeed, but I try to only say things online that I would say to the person IRL. That makes me think twice about it. I like to think that if someone was to look back through my comments or sites like HN where I use my real name, they would think that I am a reasonably reasonable human being.

Or perhaps more commonly to build a complete picture of you, including your movements, contacts and social network spanning decades, which will be sold on a grey market, so that companies can more easily exploit your fears and foibles to sell you things you don't need, and target your dreams for monetisation.

Even if no-one needs to discredit you, an entire history of you will always have value, and companies like Google, Apple and Facebook will have unique access to it.

Nope, not just you. I consider it digital hoarding in a lot of ways. I keep a lot of emails around as they're actually useful to reference at later times and easily searched and archived. But IM, Twitter, IRC, Facebook, SMS, etc I treat as passing and never look at messages further than a few weeks back.

Depends. I throw out most cards I've received and wouldn't care about saving SMSes, but I do want to keep emails for reference and would want to save tweets and especially Instagram photos. Online chats I wouldn't care about and have no expectation of storing.

Do you operate on a bigcorp-IT-style "all email older than 90 days gets deleted" policy as well?

PSA: This guy's nightclub makes a really mean meatball sandwich.

Make sure that recipe is backed up.

I hate to be that guy who plugs his own crap everywhere, but I actually wrote my own blog post recently about backing up my stuff on Linux.

My setup is fairly rudimentary, and I had the help of a friend on IRC, but here's the link if anyone is interested in setting up something simple for a Linux workstation at home or a VPS you can ssh into (really, as long as you can SSH into it with rsync, my method will work). I'd also love any feedback HN can give regarding my mechanism. Hell, if you wanted to fully back up a phone and sdcard on your desktop, you could probably do something similar with "adb pull" or the like.

https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/posts/howto-encrypted-backups-in-...

That out of the way, I'm often surprised by how often I have to remind either myself or others to make good backups. Phone's aside, there's been enough times where I've nuked my system that backing up all my files should be secondhand at this point. Thankfully, I have a decent system set up now, but I still consider it rough around the edges (especially considering how long archiving backups takes).

Any idea how to mount and open additional encrypted drives automatically, just like an encrypted /home partition at user login? I asked this ages ago on AskUbuntu http://askubuntu.com/q/103835 and by the time I got a good answer I'd already moved to a more complex set-up that was incompatible.

I'm okay with setting up rsync and grabbing everything I want backed up, then pointing it to a target drive. My issue is having to manually intervene by clicking on the drive (in Nautilus) to mount it - or having to type the password at boot.

I'm still looking for a good solution to 'automagically' mount encrypted drives at user login.

Accessing your own data and storing it is great, but there's still the matter of backing it up. jwz wrote a good guide for that as well. It's linked in the article, but not in a way that makes it obvious. Thought it would be good to mention it here:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

In that article, jwz wrote:

That third drive? Do a backup onto it the same way, then take that to your office and lock it in a desk. Every few months, bring it home, do a backup, and immediately take it away again. This is your "my house burned down" backup.

If you work for someone other than yourself, it might be safer to keep that drive at the home of a trusted friend or relative (or a safe-deposit box) rather than at your office. One day you might suddenly get fired and escorted out of your office, at which point your employer might want to inspect that hard drive to confirm that it doesn't contain proprietary corporate information. However, it may contain sensitive personal information that you don't want anyone else to see. Treating your office space as your personal space (or your work e-mail as personal e-mail) can backfire badly.

Encrypt your backups.

Then your employer could just refuse to allow you to remove the drive from their premises, since you'd have no way of proving that it doesn't contain the employer's data. Which may not be so bad, if you have another copy of the backup somewhere. The worst-case scenario would be that your primary backup drive fails on the day you get fired.

The IT staff wiping the drive to their satisfaction should obviate that concern, I'd imagine.

And the worst-case scenario would be that happening, and your primary backup drive failing, and your running drive failing, on the day you get fired. A failed primary backup drive just means you're out a backup; it takes a failure of the drive you're backing up for the situation to achieve disastrous proportions.

Honestly, my Twitter feed, Facebook, and SMS records could all disappear tomorrow, and I would be OK with it. Maybe there's value in my accumulated Facebook connections and history, but most of the value today comes from current content.

Now email, that I value for archival.

>> "Honestly, my Twitter feed, Facebook, and SMS records could all disappear tomorrow, and I would be OK with it."

I use these services heavily yet I completely agree. I actually had a Twitter account I used for 3/4 years, sent thousands of tweets and had several hundred followers. Deleting it was a 'scary' moment (kind of like formatting a hard drive and making sure you haven't forgot to backup anything) but I don't miss any of the content from it.

SMS likewise. I recently switched phones and didn't go through the hassle of bringing my SMS's with me. I miss nothing.

Facebook is slightly different. I do enjoy going through my timeline occasionally but the thing I would miss most is the photos. I don't take a lot of photos but my friends do so most of the photos on my Facebook are ones I'm tagged in so don't have a local copy. I would hate to lose those so every now and then I back them up (Facebook has an export tool for all your data).

You make a good point about value coming from current content. Years ago people perused old content nostalgically. We still do this BUT we have vastly more new content appearing in our lives every second. This means less time to go back and peruse old content especially if you have to filter it all for the gems.

"Remember: if it's not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it's not really yours."

So, if we store our data in "the cloud", it's not really ours?

Yes, exactly correct.

Well, it's 'yours', insofar as you have access to it (or should, barring outages and downtime).

But it might be accessible to someone else. And it might be lost by those hosting it.

Nothing is perfect or guaranteed.

And, once you willingly give data to third parties, you lose certain protections (at least in the US as I understand current interpretations of law).

Chat history serves one purpose for me, the file size quantifies how much I spend talking to a particular person, and I use that to sort people on my contact list.

I want to have some record of some things but not everything by far. For example, I wouldn't want a record of everything I ever did recorded, but my dad used to walk around once in a while with a video recorder on special times when everyone gathered (birthdays, holidays...) and looking at those artifacts of life from almost 30(!!) years ago is priceless. Many people in those tapes have died since then, and I'm glad they exist. I save a few letters and emails, but not all or even many. I was going back and reading an email I sent a friend about getting together with an ex and seeing the perspective I had on things back then was... weird. When I was in high school (before cell phones or text messages) people passed notes in class, and some of my friends still have a box full of them. They are relics of the past. They take up space, and you probably won't want ALL of them, but I think it is worth keeping a few. I wish I kept one or two. I can't imagine the vacant things mine would have contained. I mean, I still have my yearbooks, I didn't throw those out... same kinda thing really.

These conversations aren't ephemeral and disposable, they are your life, and you want to save them forever.

Yes they are, and no I don't. I highly doubt JWZ carries a portable recorder to immortalize all his in-person conversations; I certainly don't, even though recording people (for movies) is what I do for a living. Funnily enough, far more of my important memories involve real-life conversations than exchanges on IRC/Facebook/HN.

Yeah,. it's good to have a method of backing this stuff up if you do need it, eg for business communications or any number of other use cases. But most digital chatter is eminently disposable I wish there was a way to have emails expire and self-destruct automatically, so that things like time-sensitive sales offers would quietly vanish once the actionable date had passed unless I made some special effort to retain them.

I do throw away letters. I'd rather not live in the past or cling to ephemera for emotional reasons, thank you.

Do you plan on having children? Will your grandchildren's grandchildren wonder where they came frome and what it was like?

If only I could query the daily activities and conversations of my great grandparents or query thousands of photos and movies for people, places and moments that my have been talked about when I was a child. I could understand my family better. Educate my daughter more fully and with better context other than telling her: well part of your family comes from the abruzzi region in Italy and another part comes from Germany, I think. And your mother, I don't know much about her grandparents let along great grandparents.

It's not always about us, or right now, that is important in the scope of life a cross generations. We don't always know which of the ephemeral things in daily life are worth passing on to the next generation. Sometime they ( the next or several generations on down the line ) identify or rediscover our best moments long after we are gone.

I'm on Gentoo Linux and had my Skype settings set to never delete chat logs. After a couple of months these logs were in the tens of gigabytes. The strange thing is that I rarely even chat on Skype. This should be tens of gigabytes of just text chat. Well it's not any format that I can understand (and Skype lags badly and becomes pretty much unusable if I type /history to look at the logs) so I've had to delete them and for a while now Skype only stores the last month of chat. I can't think why the logs got so big. Perhaps Skype trys to optimize them for quick searches or something?

Anyway, does anyone know of a way to back up Skype text chats? They shouldn't have to use up this much space. (And ideally I should actually be able to load them up and read them too!)

Pictures are the worst for backing up, actually no backing up someone else's pictures is worse.

Parents for example, my mom takes a lot of pictures she wants to keep I take lots of pictures I don't care about.

Semi-wheneverly when I manage to get the card from the parent's camera or cellphone to back up it's usually a mess of I backed up 63% of these so which ones are new. Is IMG0003.JPG the same as IMG0003.JPG I saved already wait no one is 2MB and the other is 3.25MB.

Meld helps but it's the same thing what do I have and what is new and what is different with the same name but is different which I just happen to notice due to the file size.

So I end up dumping it all onto something or multiple somethings and swear I'll figure it out next time. Goto step 1.

Most pictures nowadays come with EXIF data with the date. I just (automatically) rename them to {date}-{counter}.jpg and let git-annex deduplicate any repeated files.

I delete all email after 90 days, unless I explicitly moved it to an archive folder.

I've never event thought about saving IMs, texts, Twitter, etc. Civilization has survived a very long time without a written record of every conversation ever. It will continue to do so.

Civilization survived a long time without penicillin.

I know that this isn't Reddit, but I can't resist: nick relevant!

(sorry, had to get that out of my system - am aware (AFAIK) that the black death was never treated with penicillin, given the dates involved)

Better than the racist/overtly-sarcastically ominous comments I usually get concerning my name.

that's a good policy I'm going to start following at work. I have every email I've sent or received for the past 4 years I've worked at this particular company. Prior to that I saved my emails from other jobs in the same way. But I rarely go back into those archives for anything.

There would be countless historians now who wish they had access to more past writing than they do! And that includes the minutiae that we think completely uninteresting today.

The SMS backup tool for iPhone doesn't seem to work for me. I have encrypted backups turned on for my iPhone, will this not work because of that?

Backup personal stuff and code to Tarsnap. Videos would be too expensive, but downsampled home videos might be worth saving too.

Totally off topic, but the I can read the site fine, but if I switch back to white color site (like HN, or just staring at a wall), my eyes still see the lines of the site for awhile.

It physically affects my vision for a few minutes, albeit just a little bit. Is this normal?

Your eyes have a kind of 'image retention' built in. Some optical illusions make good use of it.

It drives me nuts that pidgin and adium use different logging interfaces - its made switching from Windows to OSX more painful - as I still use finch on Linux, and use file syncing to sync logs and config files across platforms.

I view this as no different than backng up phone calls. And most people don't care to back up their phone calls. Just because you can doesn't mean it's always worth it...

Inspired by this, I went and downloaded all my tweets last night.

Then I looked through them. I can assure you that tweets may not be ephemeral, but they are most certainly disposable.

Always back up online chats so you can blackmail the participants with embarrassing or incriminating statements they made.

On android you just mount phone partition and query SQLite tables.

along these lines i'd highly recommend: http://socialsafe.net/

PSA: It is not 1999, please don't use neon green text on a black background as your color scheme for text.

It's always 1999.

I was once walking with a friend through the university library. We walked past a kid using irc on his laptop with neon green and purple on black text, font size as high as it would go, all in Comic Sans no less. Epitome of tackiness.

I made some idle snide remark about it. My friend points out that he knows the guy, who turns out to have significant visual impairment.

Cue feeling embarrassed for the rest of the afternoon :(

Browsing this in the evening I found myself immensely thankful upon switching to this tab, finding how easy on the eyes the theme was. My eyes were no longer burning from the screen's brightness and the contrast of green-on-black was brilliant. :)

Social media is just excreta of human activity on the internet. Why back that up? Lame.

I want to use this opportunity to thank drstanleyspelltemple@hotmail.com for helping me get my lover back after he left me few months ago. I have sent friends and my brothers to beg him for me but he refused and said that it is all over between both of us but when I met this Dr. Stanley, he told me to relaxed that every thing will be fine and after three days and contacted him, I got my man back......Caitlin

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