On backups and old digital data

On starting up this blog again, I wanted to import the posts from the old Google App Engine version. I had made a backup of them beforehand. Or had I? I looked in some of my backup locations:

• Dropbox
• local laptop directories
• various NAS directories

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Squat. (Doesn’t English have so many great ways to say nothing? Some of those words aren’t even English originally. But I digress.)

Old hands at backup will be shaking their heads at that list. “He should have a centralised location which will also be sent offsite automatically”, they may say (in a strangely robotic fashion. Are they robots? Weirdos). Absolutely I should. I’ve heard and read all the horror stories about fires and lightning storms destroying a life’s worth of data. But I don’t care (mostly).

You see, I wouldn’t mind if I lost all my backups. On trawling through them, I realised there are files there that I haven’t looked at in over a decade. They give me a mild shot of nostalgia, and remind me what was interesting to me all those years ago. But I don’t feel the need to go back to them.

That’s not to say there are some things I need backed up. Those I do backup, religiously. Hobby projects, accounts for the revenue, and password vaults are all kept either on Github/Bitbucket or on Dropbox. Almost the entirety of my music collection is backed up both on my NAS and on Amazon servers.

I also know exactly where all that data is backed up. Unlike my old blog posts. Which are lost. Oh well.