Random Question #1

[toothpastepancake]

 What's one piece of advice you'd give to people interested in hoarding data?

Comments

[scifirenegade]

Backup your data. Frequently. Invest on a large, good external drive (or two), maybe cloud storage if you're i to that sort of thing and mirror your data.

I have got plenty of scares, and one time I actually lost things because I slacked off on backups.

[toothpastepancake]

I just plugged in my main drive after ordering the drives I planned on using for backup... and now that drive is beeping and not being registered on my computer. Thankfully, I have most of my data saved on my main computer and a different drive, but I'm pretty sure I just lost about ~300gb or so of data in the well-organized format I'd saved it in, and some of it is lost forever now. It's funny how that happened right after I made this post! Never again will I underestimate the backup rule.

[scifirenegade]

That sucks so bad, at least not all was lost *virtual hug*

The drive I use for computer backups needed to be recovered once, because my computer wasn't registering it. And still, every once in a while I have to do that thing of changing drive letters (I'm computer illiterate) so I can access its contents :/ You never know, I guess.

[bedes]

Omg, I'm so sorry that happened hug hug I'm glad that a lot of it was backed up though!

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Save in as many ways as you can. I'm currently using 3 different archives online because 1) all of them are good at different things and 2) none of them are really reliable.

Re: Thoughts

[bedes]

Wow, can I know what they are? I only really know of archive.org.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

The other two are Ghost and Archive.Today, the latter of which I access through Paywall Reader. A more extensive list is here.

Re: Thoughts

[bedes]

Thank you very much!

[fred_mouse]

Do not let perfect be the enemy of good. It is better to stash in one folder with a plan to deal with it later than to spend all the time on a perfect folder system and never stash anything.

(Says me, who has only half transferred things from one computer to another, and it has been over a year. But I only achieved that much by making a folder called DEAL WITH THIS LATER and putting everything in it that didn't have an obvious place to go -- new computer was set up for a different workflow, and while some of the folders were easy to drop into place, others weren't)

[bedes]

Consider backing up your social media accounts! A lot of data hoarders don't consider this, but if you can think of an account where you'd be devastated if it got deleted without having the chance to save it, BACK IT UP! (Take it from me -- I nearly learned this the hard way.)