Public Service Announcement: Backup your data!

About a week ago, I ran into what would be for most people the second most serious computer problem imaginable (the most serious being complete failure of the hardware - that way you have to buy a new machine as well): the operating system would no longer boot. Because I was using encryption, and had not written down the encryption key since all I needed to normally get in was my login password, that meant that all my data on my computer was now permanently irretrievable. The problem was, of course, due to excessive hacking on my part (whoops, erased the partition tables on the wrong volume) a few weeks earlier, but I didn't know exactly what I did since my computer kept on running in a sort of walking ghost phase, acting as if nothing is wrong but ultimately doomed to fail on the next reboot. Two weeks later, I turned off my machine for the first time in over a month and discovered what had happened.

The data that was on the hard drive included the following:

• All my old school projects, essays, etc
• Everything I have programmed in the past few years
• All my photos and pictures
• My book, music and movie collection
• About $350 worth of Bitcoin

Essentially, my entire life's work gone. Well, not quite. I reinstalled the OS, ran a script to reinstall all my software (the script would have also set all my system preferences, but I decided to take the opportunity to switch from Ubuntu to Xubuntu, so I turned off that bit) and copied over the data from my 4 week old USB backup. I then proceeded to install Dropbox and allowed the daemon to copy over a much newer backup of most of my files. I back up an encrypted copy of my Bitcoin wallet manually since Dropbox is not to be trusted (or, even worse, this) in situations where you actually have something to hide, so my wallet backup was a month old. Fortunately, the coins themselves are stored on the public network, it's just the keys that the wallet stores, so even the new coins sent to me after the last backup appeared once I ran the client. In the end, all I lost was my music (too much for the Dropbox and I had added a whole bunch of new stuff since last month) and the scripts that I use to show the weather, my email and my calendar/todo list on my desktop, and I had to rewrite them - well, once again, not quite. I realized after the fact that they were still intact in my other backup (my second laptop). And as for my music, I didn't lose that either - it was all on my cellphone/media player. The one file that I didn't back up anywhere was a travel checklist I had written a few days before - well, actually I had printed that on paper. Total losses: absolutely nothing.

Why was this possible? Because of a combination of multiply redundant automatic and manual backups that covered everything I had. If any of these services go down, I've still got my stuff in three other places. Most other people facing my problem would have suffered much more severely, and it is for their benefit that I am writing this today. In an age where more and more of our work, our possessions and our memories are nothing more than bytes on a computer (and, with Bitcoin, even our money; millions of dollars have been lost or stolen due to a lack of backups or security), it is imperative to keep your data safely backed up. Some basic recommendations are to use an automatic internet backup/sync service, like Dropbox and Wuala, for your everyday work (you could pay for a big account and store your media there too, but I don't like spending money if I don't have to), and an external hard drive, USB, smartphone and/or second computer for the big stuff and the private stuff. There are also ways to encrypt and decrypt private stuff automatically for syncing so you don't have to trust whatever internet storage you use, if that's what you need. Keeping everything on a USB drive can actually be quite smart - if you're going somewhere where there will be a computer but you can't bring yours, you can just plug in your USB and do your normal computer work from there. Don't wait until disaster ultimately strikes and you lose everything, backup your data now, before you get hit with something unexpected and realize that you should have. Even a simple minimal USB backup, or uploading a zipped version of your files onto gmail, could be something that you will be immensely grateful for a year later.

Links:
Dropbox
Wuala
Ccrypt - a simple, easy to use file-based encryption program, scroll down to Qccrypt if you prefer a graphical interface to the command line