There are two kinds of people - those who have lost data and those who will.
That was a truism for most of us who grew up in the PC-era. I learned my lessons early in my career and have been religious about regular backups. In the early days, that was tape and CD; today, it's a mix of cloud backup (Mozy), external hard drive and occasionally burning files to DVDs and storing them in a fireproof safe (as a fire or storm can take out your external drive along with your laptop).
But, as we move more and more of our lives to the Cloud, backing up your data becomes more challenging.
My Evernote account has been quirky lately; any time I change networks, Evernote for OS X thinks I'm offline and I have to restart it. No big deal, but the fix that the support team proposed was to rebuild my database. Easy enough, but it brought an immediate panic. Where are my notes stored and, if the rebuild fails, how can I get them back? With Evernote, it turned out to be no big deal. I simply moved the existing notes folder to a temporary space and when I next loaded Evernote, it sync'd with my online account and rebuilt the database. But, not all apps make it that clear.
This morning, I saw a panicked post from Felix Salmon.
I'm hoping that Felix will be able to recover his notes. Staci Kramer pointed him to a potential solution.
In Felix' case, it's not the typical, oops - I deleted files from my device - but rather it's that he's deleted an account and a number of critical notes were tied to that account.
But, the bigger issue is how we can backup and manage our information that's stored across numerous services in the Cloud. For me, that includes Dropbox, gmail, Google Docs, Evernote, Flickr, Picasa, Instagram, SkyDrive and probably others. And that number continues to expand.
So, what are the services that allow us to manage and backup our cloud-based services? I could set up some rules in IFTTT to move files around, but what I really want is an easy platform that lets me backup, restore, move and access files no matter where they're stored and in what format.
What tools are you using to manage and backup your cloud data?
facepalm image courtesy striatic
