Back Up Your Backups. 4REAL.

Do you back up your computer? Your phone? How often do you save documents that you’re working on? Every hour or so? Every few minutes? What about after every sentence?

I prided myself in how well-insured I was in the event of a hard drive failure or the occasional “oops! I dropped my phone in the toilet”.  (True story: I put my mom’s cell phone through the wash back in high school.  Sorry, Mom.) I also pride myself on never needing to create a Facebook group since I lost people’s phone numbers.  OK, I’m done patting myself on the back.

Where am I going with this? (Damn it, I’m asking a lot of semi-rhetorical questions) I’ll bold the most important statement in the world right about now:  when you think you’re completely covered and you have full confidence in how well your data is backed up, find a way to back up all of your backups.

I learned this the hard way for the first time in… well, my life.  Monday I experienced some brutal Google Calendar issues.  I use live in Google Calendar.  It wasn’t down at all.  I could deal with that – hell, I’d almost prefer it.  Random calendar entries were deleting themselves. This was something I couldn’t deal with… but I didn’t have much of a choice.  I thought I was safe.  I had my calendars sitting pretty on Google’s servers and I also had them syncing up to my phone.  My phone doesn’t sync up terribly often so I figured that in the event of an error, I’d at least have my phone to refer back to.

Fast forward to Monday.  How did I first notice the errors in my calendar? By syncing my phone’s calendar with Google, of course.  Peace out, “back up”! Thank goodness that my memory can be referred to as a “steel trap” in some countries.  I was able to re-enter all of the missing calendar data (I hope) and move on from there.

I was clearly not backed up enough.  I have a new system in place that involves me manually updating iCal every time I make a change in a calendar.  This way, I have a hard copy and a crisis like Monday can be avoided (I hope).  The extra keystroke (Apple key + R – I consider that one keystroke) really isn’t too debilitating and I honestly should have been doing this from the get go.  Live and learn, right? Looping back to the original thought:  when you think you’re completely covered and you have full confidence in how well your data is backed up, find a way to back up all of your backups.

This stream-of-consciousness-late-in-the-day blog post was brought to you by Phil Toronto.  When in Rome.