You’re totally going to lose everything

June 12, 2009 by Johnny
Filed under: Blogs & sites 

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.

 

 

 

RELATED POSTS:

  1. Part 2 of the Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions is now available!
  2. How to send one domain name to another – in three different ways
  3. Why I’m exactly like Morpheus (How to turn your life totally backward in six months)

Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments

8 Comments on You’re totally going to lose everything

  1. Maryann Devine on Sat, 13th Jun 2009 3:26 pm

    2. Johnny, thanks for your recommendation. I took a look at Mozy a few months ago when someone recommended it to me. It has lots of favorable reviews from credible sources, but when I came across this one, I paused:

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-13554_3-9752350-33.html?tag=mncol;txt

    Now, this review is from 2007, but I can’t easily find anything on Mozy’s site to reassure me that these issues are resolved.

    What do you think?

  2. Johnny on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 6:59 pm

    3. The security issue is the only one that even raises an eyebrow for me. Honestly, if it concerns you, I’d go with picking your own key and guarding it with your life. I think that some of the security issues he raises are valid, but I think it also implies a whole lot of crooked cooperation at any online backup service to make it work.

    And I also come back to: Why do I care? I have nothing illegal in my backups, and there’s nothing in there that could harm me financially. I don’t have text files filled with passwords or bank numbers or anything.

    It reminds me of a story my dad tells. He lives in Philadelphia, and at one point, he thought about buying a gun to keep at home for protection. He’s not a “gun guy,” so this was significant.

    A friend of his talked to him about it and said, “But do you really want to live that way, always in fear?”

    He didn’t get the gun.

    That story… or any issue of security… is easy to misinterpret. People think, “But he could just HAVE the gun and never use it. Better to be prepared.” Same also for online security. But that’s not the point. The gun symbolized that he was willing to live in fear, always watching his back. Not getting it was an act going with the flow.

    Because you can never catch every threat to you, your security, your data, whatever. Never. The only way to be 100% protected in every way is to live in a concrete-walled fort and never communicate with the outside world.

    That’s a bit philosophical of an answer, but my thought is that there will ALWAYS be something to worry about. If this is addressed, people will say, “What about hackers?” And if that’s addressed, someone will say, “But what if you lose your pass key?” And if that’s addressed, people will say, “XYZ!”

    I look at it this way: Complex schemes at Mozy aside, it frankly seems more likely to me that someone would simply come into my house and steal my laptop and would have access to everything without having to even bother with encryption. And in that case, not only would they have my stuff…. but I’d also have no way to get it back.

    Acceptable risk, IMO.

  3. How to upgrade anything, part 2 of 6 (Heart-Centered Technology Tip) | Your Web Coaches on Tue, 30th Jun 2009 11:33 am

    4. [...] heard it before (maybe even from me, or maybe from Johnny’s post last week called you’re totally going to lose everything). You’ve probably heard the joke about there being two kinds of computer users: Those who [...]

  4. Sean Oliver on Thu, 2nd Jul 2009 2:28 am

    5. I didn’t even think of this. Thankfully its pretty much one click with godaddy.

  5. Johnny on Thu, 2nd Jul 2009 2:34 am

    6. True. Although I’d still do the dump to a file on your computer just in case, every once in a while. Not sure if I mention it in this vid, but it’s in the one in MTIYB if not.

  6. Maryann Devine on Sat, 4th Jul 2009 9:48 pm

    7. Johnny, it was really the warranty issue that disturbed me — that, according to that article, Mozy can disavow damages due to its own negligence…

  7. Flora Morris Brown, Ph.D. on Fri, 5th Feb 2010 1:09 pm

    8. I’m ashamed to admit it, but in my eagerness to switch a website from a former host to GoDaddy, I lost the blog attached to it. I was feeling confident that when I uploaded the blog that I had exported it would all be there. Not! Just the draft posts were there, not the published ones. While my files are local, it seems that the blog posts disappear into never-never land. Is it possible to recover those blog posts?

    I use an external hard drive and recently signed up with an online backup service, but I’m still not sure I’m saving my WordPress blog published posts.

    Help.

  8. Johnny on Mon, 8th Feb 2010 4:08 pm

    9. Is the blog stuff still up on the old webhost? If so, I’m sure it can be recovered.

    You SHOULD be able to export your blog from one Wordpress install, and import it into the new one.. either via an RSS export/import or by a database (SQL) export/import.

    Basically, as long as the old site still exists (even if it’s hidden) on the old hosting place, then yes, that can be recovered.

    If now… well, not sure where it would have gone wrong, but it kind of sounds like the export failed. I guess you could try the import again…?

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!