You’re totally going to lose everything
That’s a teaser title. It’s meant to bait you and scare you into reading this post.
So yeah, you’re going to lose your wife because she’s sleeping with another dude or even another gal, or if you’re a girl, you’re going to lose your husband — unless you’re gay, or unless you’re just dating, and you can see that the permutations are sort of endless here, so we’ll leave it to “you’re fucked.”
That said — and this is really an insult-to-injury thing after learning that your old lady is shacking up with Florida from Good Times — the fact is that you’re going to eventually lose your data if you don’t back things up. Like, it’s only a matter of time.
But the good news is that backing up has gotten easier, as in you no longer have an excuse not to do it. Unless you’re so lame that you just wear a big lame sign all the time, you lame-ass lame-o.
But first, let me convince you that this is all necessary by recounting a few of my own real-life experiences:
• Several times, the database that holds all of my email in my email program has gotten corrupted. If you’re like me, losing email is like losing your wallet. It suuuuuucks, and I use my emai like a big to-do list. If I lose email, I have no idea what I’ve promised people, or what I need to do for work.
• One time, my blog got a virus. Yes, that can actually happen. And if you don’t have all of your blog posts stored somewhere, you’re pretty much screwed.
• Another time, I did something as innocent as made changes to a web page file for a client. Then I realized that I had changed the wrong file, and that I had saved the changes… so there was no way to recover the original file. I had to re-create the whole damn thing.
And lastly:
• If you’re on a PC, your computer is going to crash eventually, and you lose everything. Not so much on Macs. I’ve never had a catastrophic crash, but my Dad has them every few years. He says they’re delightful.
So.
YOU NEED TO HAVE EVERYTHING BACKED UP. You just need it. Computing without regular backups is like having unprotected sex in orgies filled with guys like Ron Jeremy: it’s just a matter of time before you get cannonballed in the nuts with some horrible flesh-eating disease.
Enter the best $5 service I’ve ever seen.
I recommend Mozy backup like I recommend myself as the recipient of large sums of cash. You sign up. You download a little file and you install it (for both PCs and Macs). You tell it what you want to back up. Then (this is the way-cool part), you schedule it to do these backups automatically, through your broadband internet connection, every night, or every day during an off time.
Every damn day, this little program uploads the entirety of whatever you want up to Mozy’s servers. It’s 64-bit encrypted, meaning it’s as secure and as private as credit card data. Nobody can read any of your files without you logging in and authorizing it — including Mozy. So don’t worry, your sex pictures with Grandma will remain your little secret.
What I like best about this (other than the fact that I don’t have to think about it) is that it’s OFF-SITE. When I used to back up everything manually onto DVDs or even CDs, I used to think, “What if my house burns down?” or “What if someone steals it all?”
You use Mozy and it’s nowhere near your house. You could have a catastrophic fire, go to a buddy’s house the next day and log in, release your files, and they’d burn them to a stack of DVDs and FedEx them to you overnight.
For less catastrophic stuff, you can log in from your own computer and download the files you want.
That thing I did where I changed the wrong file and didn’t have a copy of the original? That happened after I started backing up once. So I logged in and downloaded the backup copy that Mozy had made the night before. Sweet.
You need to do this.
It’s like $5.
And it’s unlimited.
I seriously have over 40GB up there. Sure, it took a month of on-and-off uploading (automated, but I’d stop it while I was working) to get it all up there, but it’s there: My music, my photos, my files, my email database… everything that isn’t system files and applications.
Now that it’s up there, nightly backups take maybe an hour and happen while I’m sleeping. It’s so badass.
You need to fucking do this right now. Seriously, it’s so brainless and easy and you’ll never lose data again. Do it now
. Now
. Now
.
Then, all that’s left after you’ve done that is the matter of backing up your blog, so that’s the subject of the following video. You can watch it once you’ve gotten your home files backup together. (Which you should do now.)
So here’s the vid. And Jesus does my headset suck. Sorry for the audio quality. I just can’t seem to make a respectable audio recording.
Got it? So take a few minutes to back up your blog, and then go get Mozy. Like, now. You’ll sleep so much better at night. It has saved my ass so many times.
