J
jmcgill
Richard said:Well that's your mistake. Don't do years of work.
The stuff I'd go to jail, into debt, or get fired for losing, easily
fits on the smallest of media.
The stuff I get paid to create, resides on carefully managed storage
devices which are backed up in a fully accountable fashion, by people
who get paid to do that.
My personal stuff, I manage to not get myself in a situation that I
could not duplicate. There is relatively little data that must be cared
for to any special degree. I do make an effort to avoid software that
is tied to a specific piece of hardware, or which must be
"authenticated" with a finite authentication resource, largely for this
reason.
A fire or a flood destroying any of my computers (both of which I have
experienced), or the airport security breaking my notebook (happened in
Oakland), simply does not concern me beyond the credit card damage
involved in replacing the hardware.
Now, a major fire or quake or similar disaster at my office, would be
annoying, but then, we put a really large amount of money into ensuring
that such a disaster is recoverable. As for less-disastrous recovery,
we routinely request, and receive, snapshots of various things.
My point is, most people have one or two levels of things they really
should backup, and they should not allow the daunting task of backing up
hundreds of gigabytes of garbage, or readily replaceable data, to
dissuade them from backing up the couple hundred kilobytes or the couple
megabytes that would really be a problem if lost. But I see people in
this situation all the time. Practically everyone I have ever heard
bring up the whole question of "backup", seems to have been of the
opinion that if it is difficult or expensive to backup *everything*,
then *nothing* gets saved.
I usually point out that every document they have ever written in their
entire life would probably fit on much less than a CDR. The works of
Shakespeare fits in 5 Megs, for crying in a bucket.
But people will fail to backup their business records because they
cannot also backup their Spongebob Squarepants collection?