
PSA: Back Up Your Shit - mfincham
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/01/psa-back-up-your-shit/
======
steven2012
I think that the beauty of Snapchat is that it frees you from this ridiculous
notion that a text, IM, Facebook message, etc, has any value.

In my opinion, it doesn't. Also, in my opinion, I believe that feeling the
need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense
of self-worth, and that everything you say has value and needs to be saved.

I never, ever peruse through my messages, to reminisce over an old
conversation. It's too much navel-gazing to suit my sense of pride. What
actually matters is the actual relationship you have with a person, which is
built on the BODY of IMs, messages, conversations, visits, dinners, parties,
etc, that you shared with that person. Sometimes, it's best to leave good
conversations in the blurry past, and just remember that a certain person is
funny, a great conversationalist, etc.

I'm doing the same sort of thing with Google now. I will disallow anyone I'm
in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. When we talk, it's
about whatever resides in our own brains, be it good, bad or ugly. The
entertaining part of any conversation is the actual conversation, the passion,
the humor, etc. If all we wanted to do was pass around facts, then we can
forward each other URLs and be done with it. When I'm talking with someone
over dinner, we're not hammering out a contract that requires precision, we're
having a conversation over ideas, and as funny as it sounds, facts aren't as
important as the spirit of the conversation. Unless of course you're in an
argument with someone, and then that isn't very much fun so why even bother
starting the conversation in the first place.

~~~
incongruity
Honestly, a lot of what you have to say make sense, it does... But then I
remember that I still have the emails my wife exchanged almost ten years ago
when we first met - and occasionally I do look back at those. And I fall in
love with her all over again.

And then there are the random musings from friends who have died or any of a
dozen other, slightly less big deal reasons to look back -- and I realize that
in fact, those old conversations do matter, to me, often in unpredictable
ways.

Your mileage may well vary, but I'd be truly sad if I lost those bits of
history. Moreover, I wish I had access to that sort of an archive from my
parents or grandparents... So maybe it'll be interesting to my kids. Maybe
not. But the thing is, I don't know what's really going to matter and when
disk space (on this scale especially) is a so cheap, it seems foolish not to
save it.

~~~
JunkDNA
Agree with this completely. My father died when I was 23. Being a digital
packrat, I have every personal email I've ever sent or received. He wrote me
quite regularly throughout college and I have all of those emails. All the
life lessons and little bits of encouragement. My kids will never know their
grandpa, but someday maybe we can share these together and they can learn a
bit more about the kind of man he was in his own words, without my filter.
They might also like some of the historically interesting ones like:

"Mike, check out this new store:
[http://www.amazon.com](http://www.amazon.com) I think it's going to be
popular. --Dad"

~~~
foobarian
People may or may not tend to hoarding stuff. For those who do, though,
hoarding bits sure is a lot easier than hoarding physical possessions.

~~~
tunap
That is one of the points from a book I read recently. His tech advice other
than digital archiving was questionable, but all in all, a good read:

[http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Minimalist-
Life/dp/144955...](http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Minimalist-
Life/dp/1449556825)

------
famousactress
Thanks for this. The SMS export from iPhone is something I've been looking
for. One of the most important relationships and experiences of my entire life
has been documented (trapped) in my phone and it's backups ever since.

I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works, specifically whether it can
pull photos/videos as well. If it doesn't yet but it wouldn't be too much
trouble to add, I'd be willing to literally pay you to add that.

[Edit: Since a lot of the other comments are questioning the value of saving
this stuff I figured I'd share my use cases. It turned out when I thought
about it I have at least three:

1\. I effectively met my wife on myspace (believe it or not a pretty nasty
software bug led to our relationship) and an enormous amount of our initial
friendship and courtship ended up documented there. Years ago I painstakingly
clicked through for hours and copy-pasted the conversation to a text document.

2\. I had a close friend die very suddenly and at a young age. My memory
generally kind of stinks and I hated that there were conversations with him
that I half-remembered. I went back through social media conversations with
him (again, mostly on myspace) a lot in the years that followed. It helped me
piece together memories that are very important to me now.

3\. This past year my wife and I adopted our daughter. Our relationship with
her birthmother has primarily been via SMS and the months that followed were a
really exhausting and beautiful blur. It's really important to us that we're
able to share that thread with our daughter someday.

In none of these cases did I see it coming that these services would end up
having such valuable content in them for me. I didn't know I'd meet my wife.
I'll never know when the last time I talk to someone is, and I would have
never guessed that one of the most important things I'll have to give my
daughter about her birth story is an SMS conversation.

So yeah, having access to this stuff is important to me. Thanks to jwz for
pulling these resources together. ]

~~~
Nicholas_C
I lost my iPhone (had it stolen?) a few weeks ago along with several years of
text messages, voice recordings, and notes from my best friend I had known
since 5th grade who recently passed away. I had always planned to back it up
or record it somehow but was only starting to get to it when I lost it. My
greatest regret of 2013 is not backing up those texts, notes, voicemails,
etc.. Back it up as soon as you can and don't put it off or you may regret it.
Thankfully, I had backed up all our pictures over the years, and backed up
that back up, but I would pay a lot of money to have that phone back.

~~~
unepipe
As long as you plugged your iphone into your computer regularly with backups
on, or joined your home wifi network while your computer was on the network
with wifi backups on, it should still be in the backups, which would get
loaded to your new phone if you loaded the new phone you bought from the most
recent backup.

~~~
Nicholas_C
I had an iPhone 4 with iOS5 and an extremely old version of iTunes. It hadn't
synced it in a long time as iTunes had stopped recognizing my phone. Further,
windows on the computer I used to back it up on is now not booting at all. I
have assumed that all my iPhone data, if any, would be on that computer unless
it was saved in the cloud. Is that correct?

EDIT: I also unregistered my iPhone because I bought an S4 and couldn't
receive texts from those with iMessage turned on, as their phones were still
iMessaging me. Am I doomed?

~~~
unepipe
You could potentially remove the hard drive from that computer, then put it in
an external casing and hook it up to a new computer. Then research software to
pull messages out of your old backups. You could potentially still salvage the
messages, it sounded like they were old ones

~~~
rryyan
If you can recover the iPhone backup files that iTunes created from the hard
drive (such as via an external enclosure like unepipe mentions), you should be
able to recover the messages contained within. Messages are stored in a SQLite
DB within the backup (this is how jwz's script reads them).

Looks like iTunes on XP stores backups at this path: \Documents and
Settings\\(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\\.
That's the directory you need to recover from the hard drive.

------
borski
"You don't just throw your letters in the trash. You might want them some
day."

Maybe it's just me, but I actually /do/ throw my letters in the trash. I /do/
treat Twitter, etc. as ephemeral and passing. I don't care about saving those
messages. Am I the only one?

~~~
ANTSANTS
It's not just you. My fear is opposite to the one the author describes: That
by using these services, all these messages that I treat as ephemeral are
actually being recorded forever, and 20+ years from now something I said
offhand to a friend or a stranger will be used to embarrass or discredit me.

~~~
IgorPartola
Unless you are a very prominent politician or on track to become one what do
you care? I don't know... I more or less stand by what I have to say or I can
honestly say that when I said it I was "young and stupid".

~~~
cookiecaper
Social media account activity materially affects the prospects of many people
who aren't politicians, especially if you engage in any controversial
discussion. It's common for employers to name-search you and peruse your
social media history, especially in careers that involve children like
teaching, where naive new teachers are often terminated for putting child-
inappropriate content on their public profiles, or getting linked to something
they thought they'd shared anonymously.

"I was young and stupid" only works if the content in question is trivial or
unimportant. If you happen to be on the opposite side of a political debate
long since settled, you may end up getting yourself pwned pretty hard, even if
you're not a politician.

~~~
IgorPartola
Sure. However, then either watch what you say when using your real name or use
a pseudonym. I don't always succeed, but I try to only say things online that
I would say to the person IRL. That makes me think twice about it. I like to
think that if someone was to look back through my comments or sites like HN
where I use my real name, they would think that I am a reasonably reasonable
human being.

------
enigmabomb
PSA: This guy's nightclub makes a really mean meatball sandwich.

Make sure that recipe is backed up.

------
ThatGeoGuy
I hate to be that guy who plugs his own crap everywhere, but I actually wrote
my own blog post recently about backing up my stuff on Linux.

My setup is fairly rudimentary, and I had the help of a friend on IRC, but
here's the link if anyone is interested in setting up something simple for a
Linux workstation at home or a VPS you can ssh into (really, as long as you
can SSH into it with rsync, my method will work). I'd also love any feedback
HN can give regarding my mechanism. Hell, if you wanted to fully back up a
phone and sdcard on your desktop, you could probably do something similar with
"adb pull" or the like.

[https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/posts/howto-encrypted-backups-
in-...](https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/posts/howto-encrypted-backups-in-debian-
linux/)

That out of the way, I'm often surprised by how often I have to remind either
myself or others to make good backups. Phone's aside, there's been enough
times where I've nuked my system that backing up all my files should be
secondhand at this point. Thankfully, I have a decent system set up now, but I
still consider it rough around the edges (especially considering how long
archiving backups takes).

~~~
tombrossman
Any idea how to mount and open additional encrypted drives automatically, just
like an encrypted /home partition at user login? I asked this ages ago on
AskUbuntu [http://askubuntu.com/q/103835](http://askubuntu.com/q/103835) and
by the time I got a good answer I'd already moved to a more complex set-up
that was incompatible.

I'm okay with setting up rsync and grabbing everything I want backed up, then
pointing it to a target drive. My issue is having to manually intervene by
clicking on the drive (in Nautilus) to mount it - or having to type the
password at boot.

I'm still looking for a good solution to 'automagically' mount encrypted
drives at user login.

------
randomdrake
Accessing your own data and storing it is great, but there's still the matter
of backing it up. jwz wrote a good guide for that as well. It's linked in the
article, but not in a way that makes it obvious. Thought it would be good to
mention it here:

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html)

~~~
greenyoda
In that article, jwz wrote:

 _That third drive? Do a backup onto it the same way, then take that to your
office and lock it in a desk. Every few months, bring it home, do a backup,
and immediately take it away again. This is your "my house burned down"
backup._

If you work for someone other than yourself, it might be safer to keep that
drive at the home of a trusted friend or relative (or a safe-deposit box)
rather than at your office. One day you might suddenly get fired and escorted
out of your office, at which point your employer might want to inspect that
hard drive to confirm that it doesn't contain proprietary corporate
information. However, it may contain sensitive _personal_ information that you
don't want anyone else to see. Treating your office space as your personal
space (or your work e-mail as personal e-mail) can backfire badly.

~~~
count
Encrypt your backups.

~~~
greenyoda
Then your employer could just refuse to allow you to remove the drive from
their premises, since you'd have no way of proving that it doesn't contain the
employer's data. Which may not be so bad, if you have another copy of the
backup somewhere. The worst-case scenario would be that your primary backup
drive fails on the day you get fired.

~~~
aaronem
The IT staff wiping the drive to their satisfaction should obviate that
concern, I'd imagine.

And the worst-case scenario would be that happening, and your primary backup
drive failing, _and_ your running drive failing, on the day you get fired. A
failed primary backup drive just means you're out a backup; it takes a failure
of the drive you're backing up for the situation to achieve disastrous
proportions.

------
dkokelley
Honestly, my Twitter feed, Facebook, and SMS records could all disappear
tomorrow, and I would be OK with it. Maybe there's value in my accumulated
Facebook connections and history, but most of the value today comes from
current content.

Now email, that I value for archival.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "Honestly, my Twitter feed, Facebook, and SMS records could all disappear
tomorrow, and I would be OK with it."

I use these services heavily yet I completely agree. I actually had a Twitter
account I used for 3/4 years, sent thousands of tweets and had several hundred
followers. Deleting it was a 'scary' moment (kind of like formatting a hard
drive and making sure you haven't forgot to backup anything) but I don't miss
any of the content from it.

SMS likewise. I recently switched phones and didn't go through the hassle of
bringing my SMS's with me. I miss nothing.

Facebook is slightly different. I do enjoy going through my timeline
occasionally but the thing I would miss most is the photos. I don't take a lot
of photos but my friends do so most of the photos on my Facebook are ones I'm
tagged in so don't have a local copy. I would hate to lose those so every now
and then I back them up (Facebook has an export tool for all your data).

You make a good point about value coming from current content. Years ago
people perused old content nostalgically. We still do this BUT we have vastly
more new content appearing in our lives every second. This means less time to
go back and peruse old content especially if you have to filter it all for the
gems.

------
gwu78
"Remember: if it's not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it's
not really yours."

So, if we store our data in "the cloud", it's not really ours?

~~~
theorique
Well, it's 'yours', insofar as you have access to it (or should, barring
outages and downtime).

But it might be accessible to someone else. And it might be lost by those
hosting it.

Nothing is perfect or guaranteed.

------
sturmeh
Chat history serves one purpose for me, the file size quantifies how much I
spend talking to a particular person, and I use that to sort people on my
contact list.

------
aestra
I want to have some record of some things but not everything by far. For
example, I wouldn't want a record of everything I ever did recorded, but my
dad used to walk around once in a while with a video recorder on special times
when everyone gathered (birthdays, holidays...) and looking at those artifacts
of life from almost 30(!!) years ago is priceless. Many people in those tapes
have died since then, and I'm glad they exist. I save a few letters and
emails, but not all or even many. I was going back and reading an email I sent
a friend about getting together with an ex and seeing the perspective I had on
things back then was... weird. When I was in high school (before cell phones
or text messages) people passed notes in class, and some of my friends still
have a box full of them. They are relics of the past. They take up space, and
you probably won't want ALL of them, but I think it is worth keeping a few. I
wish I kept one or two. I can't imagine the vacant things mine would have
contained. I mean, I still have my yearbooks, I didn't throw those out... same
kinda thing really.

------
anigbrowl
_These conversations aren 't ephemeral and disposable, they are your life, and
you want to save them forever._

Yes they are, and no I don't. I highly doubt JWZ carries a portable recorder
to immortalize all his in-person conversations; I certainly don't, even though
recording people (for movies) is what I do for a living. Funnily enough, far
more of my important memories involve real-life conversations than exchanges
on IRC/Facebook/HN.

Yeah,. it's good to have a method of backing this stuff up if you do need it,
eg for business communications or any number of other use cases. But most
digital chatter is eminently disposable I _wish_ there was a way to have
emails expire and self-destruct automatically, so that things like time-
sensitive sales offers would quietly vanish once the actionable date had
passed unless I made some special effort to retain them.

------
flipstewart
I do throw away letters. I'd rather not live in the past or cling to ephemera
for emotional reasons, thank you.

~~~
hippee-lee
Do you plan on having children? Will your grandchildren's grandchildren wonder
where they came frome and what it was like?

If only I could query the daily activities and conversations of my great
grandparents or query thousands of photos and movies for people, places and
moments that my have been talked about when I was a child. I could understand
my family better. Educate my daughter more fully and with better context other
than telling her: well part of your family comes from the abruzzi region in
Italy and another part comes from Germany, I think. And your mother, I don't
know much about her grandparents let along great grandparents.

It's not always about us, or right now, that is important in the scope of life
a cross generations. We don't always know which of the ephemeral things in
daily life are worth passing on to the next generation. Sometime they ( the
next or several generations on down the line ) identify or rediscover our best
moments long after we are gone.

------
Ellipsis753
I'm on Gentoo Linux and had my Skype settings set to never delete chat logs.
After a couple of months these logs were in the tens of gigabytes. The strange
thing is that I rarely even chat on Skype. This should be tens of gigabytes of
just text chat. Well it's not any format that I can understand (and Skype lags
badly and becomes pretty much unusable if I type /history to look at the logs)
so I've had to delete them and for a while now Skype only stores the last
month of chat. I can't think why the logs got so big. Perhaps Skype trys to
optimize them for quick searches or something?

Anyway, does anyone know of a way to back up Skype text chats? They shouldn't
have to use up this much space. (And ideally I should actually be able to load
them up and read them too!)

------
dhughes
Pictures are the worst for backing up, actually no backing up someone else's
pictures is worse.

Parents for example, my mom takes a lot of pictures she wants to keep I take
lots of pictures I don't care about.

Semi-wheneverly when I manage to get the card from the parent's camera or
cellphone to back up it's usually a mess of I backed up 63% of these so which
ones are new. Is IMG0003.JPG the same as IMG0003.JPG I saved already wait no
one is 2MB and the other is 3.25MB.

Meld helps but it's the same thing what do I have and what is new and what is
different with the same name but is different which I just happen to notice
due to the file size.

So I end up dumping it all onto something or multiple somethings and swear
I'll figure it out next time. Goto step 1.

~~~
icebraining
Most pictures nowadays come with EXIF data with the date. I just
(automatically) rename them to {date}-{counter}.jpg and let git-annex
deduplicate any repeated files.

------
codva
I delete all email after 90 days, unless I explicitly moved it to an archive
folder.

I've never event thought about saving IMs, texts, Twitter, etc. Civilization
has survived a very long time without a written record of every conversation
ever. It will continue to do so.

~~~
BlackDeath3
Civilization survived a long time without penicillin.

~~~
tekacs
I know that this isn't Reddit, but I can't resist: nick relevant!

(sorry, had to get that out of my system - am aware (AFAIK) that the black
death was never treated with penicillin, given the dates involved)

~~~
BlackDeath3
Better than the racist/overtly-sarcastically ominous comments I usually get
concerning my name.

------
X-Istence
The SMS backup tool for iPhone doesn't seem to work for me. I have encrypted
backups turned on for my iPhone, will this not work because of that?

------
ballard
Backup personal stuff and code to Tarsnap. Videos would be too expensive, but
downsampled home videos might be worth saving too.

------
mathrawka
Totally off topic, but the I can read the site fine, but if I switch back to
white color site (like HN, or just staring at a wall), my eyes still see the
lines of the site for awhile.

It physically affects my vision for a few minutes, albeit just a little bit.
Is this normal?

~~~
bluedino
Your eyes have a kind of 'image retention' built in. Some optical illusions
make good use of it.

------
Aloha
It drives me nuts that pidgin and adium use different logging interfaces - its
made switching from Windows to OSX more painful - as I still use finch on
Linux, and use file syncing to sync logs and config files across platforms.

------
FollowSteph3
I view this as no different than backng up phone calls. And most people don't
care to back up their phone calls. Just because you can doesn't mean it's
always worth it...

------
davidgerard
Inspired by this, I went and downloaded all my tweets last night.

Then I looked through them. I can assure you that tweets may not be ephemeral,
but they are most certainly disposable.

------
normloman
Always back up online chats so you can blackmail the participants with
embarrassing or incriminating statements they made.

------
qwerta
On android you just mount phone partition and query SQLite tables.

------
jheriko
along these lines i'd highly recommend:
[http://socialsafe.net/](http://socialsafe.net/)

------
mmanfrin
PSA: It is not 1999, please don't use neon green text on a black background as
your color scheme for text.

~~~
mappu
I was once walking with a friend through the university library. We walked
past a kid using irc on his laptop with neon green and purple on black text,
font size as high as it would go, all in Comic Sans no less. Epitome of
tackiness.

I made some idle snide remark about it. My friend points out that he knows the
guy, who turns out to have significant visual impairment.

Cue feeling embarrassed for the rest of the afternoon :(

------
LeicaLatte
Social media is just excreta of human activity on the internet. Why back that
up? Lame.

------
bestspellcaster
I want to use this opportunity to thank drstanleyspelltemple@hotmail.com for
helping me get my lover back after he left me few months ago. I have sent
friends and my brothers to beg him for me but he refused and said that it is
all over between both of us but when I met this Dr. Stanley, he told me to
relaxed that every thing will be fine and after three days and contacted him,
I got my man back......Caitlin

