World Backup Day (long version)

World Backup Day is held the day before April Fool's Day because people play jokes on unsuspecting people so it's a reminder to be prepared and safe in case of disaster. 

Are your photos and sentimental digital files only on one device? How would you feel if that device failed?

There's a wonderful saying that I love:

"If you don't make time for your wellness, you'll be forced to make time for your illness".

We could say: If you don't make time to backup, you may need to make time to recover your digital life.

If you don't have a backup and your computer hard drive or phone is unrecoverable, it means:

• re-downloading purchases from the App store
• re-downloading from SD cards and drives
• scanning printed photos
• downloading sub-par quality photos from social media sites
• copying photos from family and friends
• re-downloading from iTunes or CDs
• scanning documents
• downloading from financial institutions

I think you get the picture; and depending on how you keep your data, most would be completely lost.

Writing this blog post is also forcing me to review my backup practices. I am over backed up in some areas (which is taking a lot of storage space) and under backed up in others (with a risk of losing items). 

I used to backup with TimeMachine on my iMac, but have to admit that I didn't set up my MacBook to backup since I got it almost two years ago (eek). I also have to admit that when I say "I", I mean my husband setup our iMac with TimeMachine. 

My iPhone and MacBook SYNC to icloud.

It's important to understand the difference between syncing and backing up. Backing up is making a copy at that particular moment in time. If my computer was backed up on March 1st, anything added to my computer since then is not backed up. That's why regular backups are important. If you lose everything from your computer, you can recover what was last backed up. Your computer basically goes back to your last backup date.

Syncing is a live copy. If you delete or add something in one place, it gets deleted or added at the other place.

So at any moment in time, my photo (and video) collection is exactly the same on my phone, the cloud and the Photos app on my two computers. They are synced. If I delete a photo on my phone, it gets deleted from my computers and the cloud...and vice versa. If this was all I had, my photo collection would not be considered to be backed up. If something happened to the photos on my computer and they all got deleted by mistake. They would be deleted from the cloud and the phone. 

This was one reason that I hesitated connecting to the cloud. It's scary to think of losing a collection, but in the end, I wanted it because my photo collection was out of control. I would delete on one device but it would still be on the other. I would add to one but it wouldn't be added on the other. I would edit a photo on one device but it wouldn't be edited on the other. I was duplicating work and photos. Having one collection has simplified things in my photo organization process.

Our original iMac hard drive crashed. We had TimeMachine regularly backing up on the iMac so when we replaced the hard drive, it was easy to get everything back on it. I got a bit of a warning when my MacBook was about to crash, so I copy and pasted my most important files and photos in between blue screens (which is NOT a backup - but it was better than nothing). If I had a Time Machine backup on the MacBook, we didn't load it onto the MacBook when it was fixed. That might have been the mistake we made, but it was almost full so we thought I got what was important in my copy and pasting. 

The reason I said that I was over backed up in some areas is that because I don't have time machine set up yet, I have copy and pasted photos and documents to an external drive. It's better than nothing, but speaking from experience, it can create a big mess. When my iMac became full (before I had iCloud), I copy and pasted photos to an external hard drive and removed them from my iMac. When I was bringing them back in, some of them were duplicated. That issue is for another day.

A year before the release of Toy Story 2, an employee. Luckily they found a copy on a personal computer because a technical director had been working from home. It didn't recover all the files, but at least most of them.

Do you remember MySpace? Musicians used to upload their music to that service to share with fans. During a server migration, MySpace lost all the music its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015. Any artist who uploaded and did not keep their original recording lost their music.

An acquaintance of mine had their Facebook account deleted and he did not have the original photos he had uploaded. He figured they would always be on Facebook and also didn't realize that the quality is compressed so the photo you could get back from Facebook isn't the same quality as the original.

It's so easy to lose that meaningful item via a damaged hard drive, hacked computer, broken phone, or any other glitch that erases irretrievable items. That's why we need a backup!

But, a backup takes space! So even though I am recommending backing up, you need a plan and a device with enough space to handle the data.

That's the purpose of World Backup Day, to remind us to stop thinking that we'll backup some day and create a better technological process to protect what matters most to us. Maybe we can also take the time to learn about how backing up works and how to recover to ensure we can recover our data if it gets lost. It will give us peace of mind to know our documents and memories are protected.