I’ve had an unfortunate series of events happen to my digital life over the past few months, but have learned a couple very valuable lessons from it. The unfortunate series of events began with a 500 GB hard drive failure on my home desktop PC. It had my entire life on it from 1996 to present day. All my pictures, movies, music, contacts, calendar entries, bookmarks, etc… you get the picture. Luckily I kept an external 500 GB backup drive, which I had updated a couple months before the crash. I bought a new (1 TB) hard drive for the computer and was able to recover most of my important files, not including anything new since the last backup.
Then a month later I dropped the backup drive and poof, all those backup files gone. Good thing I had already restored them onto my PC. But that’s not all. A week later my (jailbroken) iPhone went into a hacked-app coma, never to awake. That means I lost all my apps, music, pictures, videos, contacts, calendar entries, etc… AGAIN! But once again, I’ve been using the backup feature on iTunes and was able to restore everything I lost, except for the month of content since the last backup.
So, lesson #1 (and it’s been said millions of times, but couldn’t be more important): BACK UP EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS TO YOU! Back it up online, back it up on external drives, back it up on facebook and your phone. It doesn’t matter how you back it up, just make sure you have extra copies of the files that matter.
As history has progressed, humans have stored information in less and less stable mediums: stone, wood, papyrus, parchment, paper, magnetic tape, floppies, CDs and now hard drives. Each development more likely than the last to be destroyed or erased, reinforcing the need to have backups (unless you have the time to chisel your family photos into stone).
The second lesson I learned is how nice it is to start from scratch, remove some clutter and set up your phone or computer better the second time around. When my devices crashed, I didn’t rush to immediately restore them back to the cluttered messes that they were before the crash. I slowly added stuff back to the devices that I knew I was going to use and avoided downloading or installing the apps or programs that slowed it down, or in the case of jailbroken apps, that crashed my phone. I also took the opportunity to test new programs, apps and especially browser add-ons. Think of it like spring cleaning and your PC or phone can come out running much better than it did before it tried to erase your past.
UPDATE: I’ve been reviewing a few online backup sites recently and many seem like very good options. Low cost, easy to use and secure stability.
Lots of big announcements from Qualcomm at CES this year:
