I used to work retail, selling and repairing Macs and Mac accessories. When I’d sell someone a computer, I’d tell them — no, beg them — to invest in a backup solution. “I’m not trying to sell you anything!”, I’d say. “You don’t have to buy your backup device from us — though we’d be glad to sell you one for a decent price — but please, get one somewhere! Set it up — heck, we’ll set it up for you — and please… back up! When you come to us after your hard drive has inevitably failed — as all hard drives do eventually, sure as death or taxes — with your life’s work on it, you’ll be glad you backed up.”
And they’d smile, and nod, and come back some time later with a failed hard drive, no backup, and full of outrage that we couldn’t magic their data back into existence. And they’d pay absurd amounts of money for data recovery.
Back up your data, people. It’s so easy (if you’ve got a Mac, anyway). The pain of losing months or years of work is really, really, really painful.
This post convinced me to make a physical backup of a bunch of short stories I’ve been working on. At first I was going to go read through the rest of the comments thread and then go do the back up, but further consideration made me realize how silly that was—burning them to a DVD and writing “Short Story Drafts” on it with a sharpie didn’t take more than five minutes to do and made the odds of me forever losing that part of my personal history tremendously smaller. Go go gadget Taking Ideas Seriously!
Back up your data, people. It’s so easy (if you’ve got a Mac, anyway).
Thanks for the encouragement. I decided to do this after reading this and other comments here, and yes it was easy.
I used a portable hard drive many times larger than the Mac’s internal drive, dedicated just to this, and was guided through the process when I plugged it in. I did read up a bit on what it was doing but was pretty satisfied that I didn’t need to change anything.
If the person doesn’t know anything about computers or backups, he can’t distinguish “I’m not trying to sell you something” from “I am trying to sell you something and I’m lying about it” and he’d have to do a Bayseian update based on the chance that you’re trying to sell him something. Furthermore, he knows that if you are trying to sell him something, the fact that you are trying to sell him something would make it likely that anything you say is untrustworthy (and the fact that you are lying about your intent to sell him something increases the probability of untrustworthiness even more).
So the customer is being rational by not listening to you.
I am, however, reasonably competent with technology. Growing up in a congregation of all age groups, this made me one of the go-to people whenever somebody had computer problems. I’m talking middle-aged and above, the kind of people who fall for blatant phishing scams, have 256mb of RAM, and don’t know what right-clicking is.
Without fail, these people had been aware that losing all their data would be very painful, and that it could happen to them, and that backing up their data could prevent that. Their reaction was universally “this is embarrassing, I should’ve taken that more seriously”, not “I didn’t know a thing like this could happen/that I could have done something simple to prevent it”. Procrastination, trivial inconveniences, and not-taking-the-idea-seriously-enough are the culprit in a large majority of cases.
In short, I think it requires some contortion to construe the typical customer as rational here.
I note an amusing and strange contradiction in the sibling comments to this one:
VAuroch says the above is explained by hindsight bias; that the people in question actually didn’t know about data loss and prevention thereof (but only later confabulated that they did).
Eugine_Nier says the above is explained by akrasia: the people did know about data loss and prevention, but didn’t take action.
These are contradictory explanations.
Both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier seem to suggest, by their tone (“Classic hindsight bias”, “That’s just akrasia”) that their respective explanations are obvious.
I meant less that the explanation was obvious and more that it was a very good example of the effect of hindsight bias; hindsight bias produces precisely these kinds of results.
If something else is even more likely to produce this kind of result, then that would be more likely than hindsight bias. I don’t think akrasia qualifies.
To elaborate on what I think was actually going on: People ‘know’ that failure is a possibility, something that happens to other people, and that backups are a good way to prevent it, but don’t really believe that it is a thing that can happen to them. After the fact, hindsight bias transforms ‘yeah, that’s a thing that happens’ to ‘this could happen to me’ retroactively, and they remember knowing/believing it could happen to them.
Limits of language, I think. Both explanations are possible, giving what the parent post said; both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier may have had experience with similar cases caused, respectively, by hindsight bias and akrasia, which makes their explanation appear obvious to them.
A lot of the time, I’ve noticed that “it’s obvious” means “I have seen this pattern before (sometimes multiple times), and this extra element is part of the same pattern every time that I have seen it”
Their reaction was universally “this is embarrassing, I should’ve taken that more seriously”, not “I didn’t know a thing like this could happen/that I could have done something simple to prevent it”.
Classic hindsight bias. If you went to a representative sample of similar people who had not recently suffered a backup-requiring event, they would probably think the second version, not the first.
Hindsight bias is almost certainly a component. Plus, I was a friendly member of their in-group, providing free assistance with a major problem, so they had two strong reasons to be extra-agreeable.
Even so, in my experience, your second sentence does not match reality. As in, doing exactly that does not in fact yield responses skewing toward the second option, even among the very non-tech-savvy. Many of them don’t know exactly how to set such a thing up (but know they could give a teenager $20 to do it for them, which falls under “trivial inconveniences”), but the idea is not new info to them.
My sample size here is small and demographically/geographically limited, so add as many grains of salt as you see fit.
Well, look, of course I’d prefer to sell the customer something. If, knowing this, you take everything out of my mouth to be a lie, then you are not, in fact, being rational. The fact that I would specifically say “buy it elsewhere if you like!”, and offer to set the backup system up for free, ought to tell you something.
The other part of this is that the place where I worked was a small, privately owned shop, many of whose customers were local, and which made a large chunk (perhaps the majority) of its revenue from service. (Profit margins on Apple machines are very slim.) It was to our great advantage not to lie to people in the interest of selling them one more widget. Doing so would have been massively self-defeating. As a consequence of all of this, our regular customers generally trusted us, and were quite right to do so.
Finally, even if the customer decided that the chance was too great that I was trying to sell them something, and opted not to buy anything on the spot, it is still ridiculously foolish not to follow up on the salesperson’s suggestion that you do something to protect yourself from losing months or years of work. If that is even a slight possibility, you ought to investigate, get second and third opinions, get your backup solution as cheaply as you like, and then take me up on my offer to install it for free (or have a friend install it). To not back up at all, because clearly the salesperson is lying and the truth must surely be the diametrical opposite of what they said, is a ludicrously bad plan.
Well, look, of course I’d prefer to sell the customer something. If, knowing this, you take everything out of my mouth to be a lie, then you are not, in fact, being rational. The fact that I would specifically say “buy it elsewhere if you like!”, and offer to set the backup system up for free, ought to tell you something.
It tells customers something, but considering that these are plausible marketing techniques, it’s not very strong evidence.
If you tell the customers that something is really important, that they should buy it, even if from somewhere else, this signals trustworthiness and consideration, but it’s a cheap signal considering that if they decide, right in your store, to buy a product which your store offers, they probably will buy it from you unless they’re being willfully perverse. Most of the work necessary to get them to buy the product from you is done in convincing them to buy it at all, and nearly all the rest is done by having them in your store when you do it.
Offering to provide services for free is also not very strong evidence, because in marketing, “free” is usually free*, a foot-in-the-door technique used to extract money from customers via some less obvious avenue. Indeed, the customers might very plausibly reason that if the service was so important that they would be foolish to do without it, you wouldn’t be offering it for free.
Indeed, the customers might very plausibly reason that if the service was so important that they would be foolish to do without it, you wouldn’t be offering it for free.
Given that setting up backups on a Mac is so easy that, as I suggested in my quoted spiel, the customer could even do it themselves, this is not a very well-supported conclusion.
foot-in-the-door technique used to extract money from customers via some less obvious avenue.
Well, duh. You “extract” money from customers by the fact of them liking you, trusting you, and getting all their service done at your shop, and buying future things they need from you, also.
if they decide, right in your store, to buy a product which your store offers, they probably will buy it from you unless they’re being willfully perverse.
I think you underestimate how doggedly many people hunt for deals. I don’t even blame them; being a retail shop, my place of work sometimes couldn’t compete with mail-order houses on prices.
You’re right, though: if they decided then and there that they would buy the thing, the customers often in fact went ahead and bought it then and there.
But you might plausibly think “hmm, suspicious. I’ll wait to buy this until I can do some research.” Fine and well; that’s exactly what I’d do. Do the research. Buy the thing online. But dismissing the entire notion, based on the idea that “bah, he was just trying to sell me something”, is foolishness.
I think you underestimate how doggedly many people hunt for deals.
The customer is estimating the probability that the statement is a sales pitch. The fact that many people would hunt for deals affects the effectiveness of the sales pitch given that it is one, not the likelihood that the statement is a sales pitch in the first place. Those are two different things—it’s entirely possible that the statement is probably a sales pitch, but the sales pitch only catches 20% of the customers.
Yes; that comment was a response to your scenario whereby someone has already decided to purchase the item. You asserted that said person would then surely purchase it in the store, at the moment of the decision to purchase. I claimed that some people are too keen on getting a good deal to do that, opting instead to wait and buy it mail-order or online.
This is unrelated to the probability of my statements being a sales pitch.
Thus, a person might think: “Hmm, is this merely a sales pitch? Perhaps; but even if it is, and it succeeds in convincing me to buy a backup device, I might well still not buy it here and now, because I really want a good deal.” They might then conclude: “And so, given that the salesman knows this, and is nonetheless insistent that I should buy it — and is even encouraging me to buy it elsewhere if it’ll get me to buy it at all — I should take his words seriously; at least, seriously enough to look into it further.”
it is still ridiculously foolish not to follow up on the salesperson’s suggestion that you do something to protect yourself from losing months or years of work. If that is even a slight possibility, you ought to investigate, get second and third opinions, get your backup solution as cheaply as you like, and then take me up on my offer to install it for free (or have a friend install it).
That’s Pascal’s Mugging. You’re suggesting that because the purported consequence of not having a backup is large, even if the probability is small, the customer should make an expenditure (do research) on it.
All of this seems like a fully general counterargument to doing anything that any salespeople tell you to do, ever.
One imagines that some of those customers who later returned to angrily and tearfully demand data recovery, followed something like your line of reasoning, and decided not to back up their data. As a result, they are now sitting on top of their giant pile of utility.
… oh wait.
Do you think it’s just chance that following your logic leads you to lose, in this case? And not just lose: be almost guaranteed to lose, if in fact you have something to lose. (All hard drives fail. All of them. It’s just a matter of time.)
All of this seems like a fully general counterargument to doing anything that any salespeople tell you to do, ever.
It is sometimes smart to do something that a salesperson tells you to do. But you shouldn’t do it because the salesperson tells you; the fact that the salesperson tells you to do it is not very useful information.
One imagines that some of those customers who later returned to angrily and tearfully demand data recovery, followed something like your line of reasoning, and decided not to back up their data.
They had no reason to believe the salesperson’s advice was good. The fact that the salesperson’s advice was good, and following it would have left them better off, doesn’t change this. It just makes it a case of bad luck. Saying “If they had followed the advice of that salesman they’d have been better off, so they should have listened to that salesman” is like saying “if they had followed the advice of that tea leaf reader, they’d have been better off, so they should have listened to that tea leaf reader.”
It is sometimes smart to do something that a salesperson tells you to do. But you shouldn’t do it because the salesperson tells you; the fact that the salesperson tells you to do it is not very useful information.
Yeah, exactly. In that particular case, you’re either savvy enough and you know that you should backup your data (in which case you’re likely to buy backup storage from someone other than overpriced Apple), OR you’re not savvy enough, in which case you have to take it on faith that e.g. hard drives break down often enough, that there’s no existing built-in redundancy to begin with, that the backup solution actually works, etc etc.
edit: Besides, good hard drives have yearly probability of failure of less than 5%, so the data better be simultaneously worth several hundred bucks and not be worth sharing with other people, copying to other computers, etc.
It might be worth mentioning here that cheap external hard drives are crap. I’ve made a practice for the last few years of using them for backups and anything else I need a terabyte drive for (mostly media storage), and in that time I’ve lost three of them, about one every year and a half. I haven’t lost an internal drive since about 1995.
The usual point of failure seems to be the backplane rather than the drive itself, though. So the data’s recoverable as long as it’s not hardware encrypted.
sharing with other people, copying to other computers, etc.
What do you think “backing up” means, exactly?
It’s not some tech magic that only happens in the presence of certain specific, specially sanctified, pieces of equipment. If you have your data in more than one place, such that if one location goes down, the data still exists elsewhere — congratulations, your data is backed up.
However, if we’re talking about a full backup, then there’s also another consideration:
the data better be simultaneously worth several hundred bucks
It’s not just the data, it’s also your time.
Without a Time Machine backup
Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You then have to spend the next several days:
a) reinstalling your operating system;
b) reinstalling all of your programs;
c) performing all software updates;
d) reconstructing all of your application-specific settings and other aspects of your configuration.
With a Time Machine backup
Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You boot from your system DVD or recovery partition and click the button to restore from backup. In an hour or two, as if by magic, your system is fully restored to its state as of the last backup, data, applications, settings, and all.
If your data plus at least a day, usually several days, of time lost, is not worth even one hundred dollars (which is how much a terabyte hard drive plus external enclosure costs these days), then I suppose you’re not doing anything of particular value with your time and you may freely ignore my advice.
If your data plus at least a day, usually several days, of time lost, is not worth even one hundred dollars
You forgot the division by the probability of this happening.
I’m not saying backups are not worth it, I do backup my system, what I am saying is that it’s not necessarily the case that backups are worth it for your regular person that doesn’t customize things a lot, doesn’t have much valuable data, uses very few programs regularly, and what ever valuable data they got is backed up on other computers. edit: for that matter, average person’s settings are probably of negative value to them, heh.
edit : holy cow , some drives have annual failure rate of 0.9% .
I don’t know what “regular people” you hang out with, so this might be true in your experience. When I worked retail, many of our customers were creative professionals of some sort — musicians, photographers, digital artists, writers, etc. Their computers had tons of work-relevant data.
Another example: my mother, certainly a “regular person” insofar as she has no tech industry background, is an educator. On her computer are things like work-related documents; syllabi; curriculum design docs; teaching materials; etc. All of that is certainly valuable.
Do you actually know people who own and use a personal computer, but have no valuable data on it, or very little? Also, how do you peg the value of your Great American Novel you’ve been writing in your off time for the last three years?
I don’t really hang out with regular people generally, and I was speaking in the data by sheer tonnage. The examples you’re listing fit on a single SD card. Non computer proficient people I know are really paranoid about the computer failing so they copy their stuff onto disks manually (even though better options are available).
How much revenue in dollars do you think a typical person with failed hard drive will lose, on the average?
(The total net worth of the data I got is definitely in the six and most likely in the seven figures range in terms of total loss of revenue if i’d lost all of it, so it’s backuped rigorously of course, off site too in case of fire) edit: also I have large data that is valuable, not just photos (which people nowadays upload someplace on the internet).
The examples you’re listing fit on a single SD card.
What?!
<consults Newegg>
It seems you can get SDXC cards in capacities up to 256 GB… for over $600. The up-to-$100 range gets you, perhaps, 64 GB. The sort of data I refer to in my first example most certainly does not fit onto one of those; and even the largest SD cards in no way, shape, or form have the capacity to let you do a full backup (i.e., the kind that saves you all that reinstall time) on a machine you use for any kind of media work.
(The total net worth of the data I got is definitely in the six and most likely in the seven figures range in terms of total loss of revenue if i’d lost all of it, so it’s backuped rigorously of course, off site too in case of fire) edit: also I have large data that is valuable, not just photos (which people nowadays upload someplace on the internet).
Well, there you go. I don’t know why you think “regular people” don’t do important, valuable things on their computer, or don’t have lots of data, but in my experience, they certainly do.
In any case, my original point remains, which is that even if you backup your several megabytes of important Word documents onto Dropbox, and that’s your entire backup strategy, and your time is so worthless to you that you don’t mind spending hours or days reinstalling...
… that’s still a backup strategy. Not backing up would still be worse.
(As an aside, measure the value of time exclusively in lost revenue has always struck me as shortsighted as heck.)
What do people do when they get a new computer, do they copy over all settings automatically, usually, or not?
and your time is so worthless to you that you don’t mind spending hours or days reinstalling.
The annual failure rate was 0.9% for Hitachi drives… let’s say, 1%. So, for example, if the full backup costs $100 per year, the reinstalling would needs to cost $10 000 assuming linearity. Which is an overestimate due to possibly higher probability of accidentally deleting your data with your own hands, things getting stolen, etc, yes, I know. Why you keep repeating “time is so worthless”?
In the context of you being a salesman, the regular person, they don’t know what is the failure rate of the drive, they have to trust you that it is high enough, and you being a salesman, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to trust you. You can’t somehow prove from the first principles that the rate is high enough. It is not obvious that the rate is high enough. In fact for some manufacturers the rate can well be not high enough, unless we are speaking of operating system failures, human errors, and such.
edit: misremembered some other failure rate, fixed.
edit2: to summarize, between them backing up the most valuable data manually, the low probability of failure, and their low confidence in the words of a salesman, you can have a rational decision here. (I’m of course playing the advocate for “stupid people” not present to advocate themselves)
What do people do when they get a new computer, do they copy over all settings automatically, usually, or not?
If it’s a Mac, I think they do, because it’s so easy. In my experience they certainly do.
backing up the most valuable data manually
Uh, but if they back up their data “manually”, then they have thereby followed my advice. I don’t know why you keep drawing this distinction. My exhortations have always been to back up somehow. I never said “and you absolutely must do so with the following preapproved backup technology which you must buy, and certainly not any solution you may already have access to”.
The annual failure rate was 0.9% for Hitachi drives
The following are nitpicks, but still: a) not everyone has Hitachi drives; b) failure rates were higher in the past; c)
As for your monetary value argument, it ignores nonlinear marginal utility of money, risk aversion, and difficulties in translating value of time into money. (As do most such arguments.)
Uh, but if they back up their data “manually”, then they have thereby followed my advice.
Ahh, ok. Albeit there’s the second point with regards to the full backup.
As for your monetary value argument, it ignores nonlinear marginal utility of money, risk aversion, and difficulties in translating value of time into money. (As do most such arguments.)
Yeah, I know. I’d still backup. The point is, those are variables and may differ quite a bit, especially for the full-backup advantage.
On the other side of spectrum though, I know a lawyer whose opinion is that you should not keep durable records unless you actually really need to have them. (I think he often does divorce dispute cases and such).
On the other side of spectrum though, I know a lawyer whose opinion is that you should not keep durable records unless you actually really need to have them. (I think he often does divorce dispute cases and such).
Interesting. That’s certainly a perspective I hadn’t considered. One sort-of-related situation is one of political dissidents, activists, etc.: such people would almost certainly not want to use Dropbox and similar cloud storage solutions for e.g. lists of contacts, but they might want more private backups (off-site over-network backup solutions, for instance) to protect data against government seizure of their computers.
Certainly, if your concern is having your data accessible by entities (such as the government) that will take coercive measures to get it, then the equation changes.
such people would almost certainly not want to use Dropbox and similar cloud storage solutions for e.g. lists of contacts
It depends on whether they consider themselves vulnerable to rubberhose cryptography. If not, they can backup encrypted files anywhere they want to, including Dropbox, etc. But if they do, then it becomes a game of steganography and the local hard drives of their machines aren’t safe either.
Indeed, although the truly paranoid may rig their hard drives to self-destruct, or take some similar measure, in the event of the police breaking down their door.
I imagine active destruction of that kind might create huge legal problems of it’s own. On the technical side you can store the key in a file you can securely destroy.
I heard somewhere that in the US and UK, an average law abiding citizen, from the formal standpoint, rather frequently breaks various laws by accident. No idea about other jurisdictions. This is why NSA is such a big deal.
I imagine active destruction of that kind might create legal problems of it’s own.
If your fear of rubberhose cryptography is well-justified, “legal problems” are a minor part of your worries.
By the way, it’s hard to destroy a hard drive to the extent that a determined government wouldn’t be able to extract data from it. At least hard during the time it takes the police to break down your door.
I heard somewhere that an average law abiding citizen, from the formal standpoint, rather frequently breaks various laws.
Interesting. I’m curious what kind of laws are frequently broken… at company level I know there’s a plenty of regulations related to health and safety which are here for a good reason when people are working with, say, dangerous machinery, but are silly in the office context.
edit: how many laws would a company break if a computer scientist replaced a light bulb?
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”—Cardinal De Richelieu
1) There’s a large consequence, with a low probability, and a low cost action which should be taken to avoid the consequence (or to get the consequence if it’s positive)
2) It is said that the size of the consequence makes up for the low probability, either explicitly or implicitly
3) The low probability of the large consequence has a large component consisting of uncertainty about the probability itself. This typically involves questions like “are they lying about the probability”, “are they exaggerating the probability”, or “are they mistaken about the probability”.
The difference, however, is that in Pascal’s Mugging, after you pay the mugger $5 (or whatever), you remain absolutely clueless about whether he was for real, or a swindler, and whether the threat he described had the slightest grounding in reality.
In this case, after you take the low-cost action (doing a bit of research, looking for a second opinion), you now know whether the salesman was feeding you a line of nonsense or whether he was warning you of a real threat.
In any case, I think that all you’ve shown is that declaring a situation to be a Pascal’s Mugging is not a good proxy for deciding whether you should do something.
Salesmen make lots of claims. What you suggest would mean that pretty much every time you talk to a salesman, you need to go and research all the claims the salesman makes that imply danger. In fact, by your reasoning, every time a tea leaf reader tells you to do something, you ought to research it to determine if the tea leaf reader is correct about that. After all, by your own argument, there are many cases where if you do the research you will know whether the tea leaf reader’s suggested course of action is helpful. Certainly if the tea leaf reader told you to do backups, research would tell you whether that’s true.
Salesmen often know what they’re talking about. They could be lying, or not. Tea leaf readers, however, just make stuff up.
It remains true that a customer who followed your logic would lose all their valuable data, whereas a customer who rejected your logic would have everything backed up, and lose nothing. In short: if you’re so smart, why aintcha rich? (In utilons, in this case, rather than dollars.)
There’s a difference between big-box stores and small mom-and-pop outfits. Of course the sales floor at Best Buy is staffed entirely by morons. That’s why we buy things on Amazon. (Well, not the only reason.)
I assure you that being knowledgeable gets you far in sales, given certain conditions.
Perhaps. I don’t go to stores (other than food) much. I can’t recall last time that I was buying something expensive and the salesman knew more about that thing than I did.
Well now, hold on. I wouldn’t expect a salesman to know more about computer technology than I do; but I’ve got a background in comp sci and IT; it would be an unreasonable expectation.
If, however, you’re an average person, a layman, and you’ve not done your own research (perhaps because you’re not savvy enough to do that, or too lazy, or something), and you go into a good tech-related store, then expecting the salesman to know more than you do is quite reasonable.
So it depends on what sorts of things you buy, and on where your own expertise lies.
Personally, the last time I went into a store and the salespeople knew more than I was in a hardware store. It was a small place in Brooklyn, strictly local, non-chain, been around as long as I can remember. Those guys really know their stuff.
Salesmen often know what they’re talking about. They could be lying, or not. Tea leaf readers, however, just make stuff up.
The combination of salesmen telling the truth about things they know and lying about things they know is, as a whole, comparable to a tea leaf reader who neither knowingly tells the truth nor knowingly lies much..
It remains true that a customer who followed your logic would lose all their valuable data
Yes, he’d be unlucky. He’d be unlucky enough to have stumbled into one of the few rare cases where being rational produces a bad result. Being told to do backups is not a typical case of listening to a salesman (or tea leaf reader). It’s a highly unusual case.
Just because someone would have been better off if they had done action X, it does not follow that it would then have been rational to have done action X.
They might decide that you’re in breach of their ToS and close your account.
They could go out of business.
Anywhere your data are, they are exposed to some risks. The trick is to have multiple copies, such that no event short of the collapse of civilisation will endanger all of them together.
Precisely. My most immediately critical data — the stuff on which my current employment and professional success/advancement depends — exists in no less than seven places:
My desktop’s primary drive (an SSD).
My desktop’s backup hard drive.
My laptop’s primary drive (an SSD).
My laptop’s backup hard drive.
The primary drive (an SSD) of a different computer, in a different part of the country.
That computer’s backup hard drive.
A cloud-based storage service.
I worry that that’s not enough. I am considering investing in some sort of NAS, or two, and placing them in more secure areas of both of the dwellings to which I have access.
How much time are you spending keeping all of that in sync...?
Just having a lot of drives is not a good use of resources from the data protection standpoint. It ensures you protection against the catastrophic failure of one or two drives simultaneously, but you seem unprotected against most other forms of data loss: for example, silent corruption of files (what are you using to ensure integrity? I don’t see any mention of hashes or DVCSes), or mistaken deletions/modifications (what stops a file deletion from percolating through each of the 7 before you realize 6 months later that it was a critical file?).
For improving general safety, you should probably drop some of those drives in favor of adding protection in the form of read-only media and error detection + forward error correction (eg periodically making a full backup with PAR2 redundancy to BluRays), and more frequent backups to the backup drives.
Synchronization is automatic. It does not take up any of my time.
I have enough drive space to maintain backups going back several months, which protects against both file corruption (volume corruption is taken care of by redundancy) and mistaken deletion/modification. In any case, the files in question are mostly text or text-based, not binary formats, so corruption is less of a concern.
Code, specifically, is of course also kept in git repositories.
Backups to read-only media are a good idea, and I do them periodically as well (not blurays, though; DVDs or even CDs suffice, as the amount of truly critical data is not that large).
I can verify this—as an acknowledged “computer person” and “rational person”, I still didn’t back up my data, even while advising my friends that they should and they’ll be sorry when they don’t. Fortunately, my hard drive started making interesting new noises, rather than failing without warning, so I didn’t embarrass my self too badly. It is fairly common for someone to acknowledge and advise others of backing up their data, but failing to do so themselves.
I think it’s a combination of procrastination, laziness, being super-cheap, optimism/arrogance, and not having especially valuable data. Though people with valuable data do it too.
It depends on your use case. My “life work” consists exclusively of things I’ve typed. These types of files tend to be small, and lend themselves to being written in Google Documents. If I use Emacs, then the files are tiny and I back them up to Google Drive in about 2 seconds. This costs me all of $0 and is very easy.
But maybe your life work also includes a bunch of pictures documenting your experiences. These, and other large files, will quickly exceed your 15 gigs of free storage. Then you’re probably looking at an external hard drive or cloud storage. The better fit will depend on things like your internet connection, which USB standard your computer has, your tech level, how much stuff you need backed up, whether you travel a lot, whether you’ll lose or damage the external hard drive, etc.
Of course, there’s more elaborate solutions for power users, but by the time you’re high enough level for them, you’re a power user and don’t need to ask.
I don’t use Windows nearly as much, but one idea (depending on use case, as zedzed said) is cloud storage. Dropbox is free up to 2 GB. Paid services exist. Synchronization is regular and automatic; some services keep some file history, as well.
(This is a stream of consciousness where I explore why I haven’t backed up my data. This proceeds in stages, with evolution to the next stage only because the writing of this comment forced me to keep going. Thus, it’s a data point in response to this comment.)
Back up your data, people. It’s so easy
Interesting. I have a very dense ‘ugh field’ around backing up my data, come to think of it. Based on this population of one, it has nothing to do with not trusting the salesperson, or not being aware that my hard drive is going to fail.
… in fact, I know my hard drive is about to fail (upon reboot I get those dooming system error messages that cycle, etc.) and has occurred to me several times I might want to back up my data. Yes, there’s some important stuff I need to back up.
Maybe the hurdle is that most stuff on my computer is useless, and I don’t want to prioritize the material. I just want it all there if I need it, so I wish my computer wouldn’t break.
Since I know my computer is likely to break, or in case the power goes out or I accidentally close without saving, while working I save files electronically very frequently, and I make hard copies if there will be any pain within say -- 72 hours—of losing a particular document. The pain of the loss of anything later than a few days is discounted. (Is that hyperbolic discounting? Or just akrasia, as another commenter suggested?)
But I do know I won’t spend 20 minutes tomorrow investigating how to back up my hard drive. I know someone will say it is “easy”, but there will instead be some obstacle that will mean my data won’t actually get backed up and I’ll have wasted my twenty minutes. Right?
… OK, fine. (sigh) Let’s suppose my budget is $20 and 20 minutes. What should I do?
(reading online)
...OK, I buy a hard-drive, connect it with a USB, and drag and drop the files I want to save once the computer recognizes the device. Although I still need to determine which folders are worth saving, and this is a continuous, ongoing chore, there are some folders I know I need to save right away. I should go ahead and store those.
(I’ll report back tomorrow whether this back-up actually happened.)
Let’s suppose my budget is $20 and 20 minutes. What should I do?
Others have mentioned Dropbox, but it’s so wonderful I’ll mention it again. Dropbox. It’s almost as awesome in its just-works-ness as Time Machine (Apple’s awesome backup solution). Free up to 2GB, $10/month gets you 100GB. Runs on everything.
Note that Dropbox isn’t designed as a backup solution, it’s really for sharing files across multiple devices. It only preserves the current version of a file, so offers no protection against deleting a file you didn’t mean to. As soon as you edit a file, the changes are uploaded to the Dropbox cloud.
A point to remember is that every backup solution protects against some threats but not others, and you have to decide what you need to defend against. I have a Time Capsule (external drive for Time Machine backup), but it’s in the same room as the computer, so it provides excellent protection against disc failure or accidental deletion, but none against theft. So I also have an external drive that I plug in once a week and the rest of the time leave hidden elsewhere. If the files on your computer are your livelihood, you need an off-site backup to survive risks such as your house burning down, or serious burglars doing a complete house clearance.
Although I still need to determine which folders are worth saving, and this is a continuous, ongoing chore
A backup solution that presents a continuous, ongoing chore is not going to work. It has to be something that once you set it up, Just Works. I don’t know if there’s anything as awesome as Time Machine in this respect for Windows. Ideally a solution should automatically backup everything, except possibly some things you specifically exclude. If you only back up things you specifically decide to, you will inevitably leave things out, that you’ll only discover when you need the backup you don’t have.
It only preserves the current version of a file, so offers no protection against deleting a file you didn’t mean to. As soon as you edit a file, the changes are uploaded to the Dropbox cloud.
Dropbox actually does version control, which has saved several files I’ve accidentally deleted or overwritten. It’s only up to 30 days, though.
I take it you’ve got a Windows or Linux machine? Because if you have a Mac, there’s a much easier solution. Edit: I mean easier than a continuous, ongoing chore of deciding what files to save, drag-and-dropping stuff, etc. You do still need to buy a device, though. For a $20 budget I recommend this 32 GB USB flash drive.
I have a Windows machine, but I know there are automatic back-up schedules that can be done. I just don’t want to do it… I don’t want to think about a complex automatic process or make decisions about scheduling. Trying to pinpoint why … it feels messy and discontinuous and inconvenient, to keep saving iterations of all my old junk.
it feels messy and discontinuous and inconvenient, to keep saving iterations of all my old junk.
When dealing with old data, what I find most stressful is deciding which things to keep. So as far as possible I don’t. It’s a wasted effort. I keep everything, or I delete everything. It doesn’t matter that there’s gigabytes of stuff on my machine that I’ll never look at, as long as I never have to see it or think about it. Disc space is measured in terabytes these days.
Typically when I change machines, the data from the old one goes into the /old folder on the new one. You get a nesting hierarchy and down at the bottom there are some files from many years ago that I would need to get a simulator to even read :-/
So that’s what I am going to do. I actually ordered an external hard drive, and every few weeks I’ll back up my hard drive. The whole thing (no decisions).
I also understand that I don’t need to worry about versions—the external hard drive just saves the latest version.
I also talked to a friend today and found out they backed their data regularly. I was surprised; didn’t know regular people did this regularly.
Backups aren’t about saving your old junk. Backup are about saving everything that you have on your hard drive in case it goes to the Great Write-Only Memory In The Sky.
If you’re talking about staggered backups or snapshots, their usefulness lies mostly in being a (very primitive) versioning system, as well as a possible lifeline in case your data gets silently corrupted and you don’t notice fast enough.
Well, the way it works on the Mac — and I’m only describing this because I speculate that similar, if not quite as awesome, solutions exist for Windows — is this:
Scheduling: backups happen every hour if the backup drive is plugged in; or, whenever you plug it in; plus, you can trigger them manually. You pretty much don’t have to think about it; just either keep the thing plugged in (easy with a desktop), or plug it in once in a while.
Multiple iterations of your stuff: there’s a “history” of backups, maintained automatically. You can go back to any backed-up prior version (to a certain point; how long a history you can keep is dictated by available storage space). The interface for restoring things hides the messy complexity of the multiple versions from you, and just lets you go back to the latest version, or any previous available version, sorted by time.
With good backup software, it’s really quite smooth and easy. The process is not complex; decisions to be made are minimal; your backup feels nice and non-messy; restoring is easy as pie.
Unfortunately I can’t recommend good Windows backup software, but maybe someone else can chime in.
Oh boy, is this ever a good example.
I used to work retail, selling and repairing Macs and Mac accessories. When I’d sell someone a computer, I’d tell them — no, beg them — to invest in a backup solution. “I’m not trying to sell you anything!”, I’d say. “You don’t have to buy your backup device from us — though we’d be glad to sell you one for a decent price — but please, get one somewhere! Set it up — heck, we’ll set it up for you — and please… back up! When you come to us after your hard drive has inevitably failed — as all hard drives do eventually, sure as death or taxes — with your life’s work on it, you’ll be glad you backed up.”
And they’d smile, and nod, and come back some time later with a failed hard drive, no backup, and full of outrage that we couldn’t magic their data back into existence. And they’d pay absurd amounts of money for data recovery.
Back up your data, people. It’s so easy (if you’ve got a Mac, anyway). The pain of losing months or years of work is really, really, really painful.
This post convinced me to make a physical backup of a bunch of short stories I’ve been working on. At first I was going to go read through the rest of the comments thread and then go do the back up, but further consideration made me realize how silly that was—burning them to a DVD and writing “Short Story Drafts” on it with a sharpie didn’t take more than five minutes to do and made the odds of me forever losing that part of my personal history tremendously smaller. Go go gadget Taking Ideas Seriously!
Thanks for the encouragement. I decided to do this after reading this and other comments here, and yes it was easy. I used a portable hard drive many times larger than the Mac’s internal drive, dedicated just to this, and was guided through the process when I plugged it in. I did read up a bit on what it was doing but was pretty satisfied that I didn’t need to change anything.
If the person doesn’t know anything about computers or backups, he can’t distinguish “I’m not trying to sell you something” from “I am trying to sell you something and I’m lying about it” and he’d have to do a Bayseian update based on the chance that you’re trying to sell him something. Furthermore, he knows that if you are trying to sell him something, the fact that you are trying to sell him something would make it likely that anything you say is untrustworthy (and the fact that you are lying about your intent to sell him something increases the probability of untrustworthiness even more).
So the customer is being rational by not listening to you.
I am not a salesman.
I am, however, reasonably competent with technology. Growing up in a congregation of all age groups, this made me one of the go-to people whenever somebody had computer problems. I’m talking middle-aged and above, the kind of people who fall for blatant phishing scams, have 256mb of RAM, and don’t know what right-clicking is.
Without fail, these people had been aware that losing all their data would be very painful, and that it could happen to them, and that backing up their data could prevent that. Their reaction was universally “this is embarrassing, I should’ve taken that more seriously”, not “I didn’t know a thing like this could happen/that I could have done something simple to prevent it”. Procrastination, trivial inconveniences, and not-taking-the-idea-seriously-enough are the culprit in a large majority of cases.
In short, I think it requires some contortion to construe the typical customer as rational here.
I note an amusing and strange contradiction in the sibling comments to this one:
VAuroch says the above is explained by hindsight bias; that the people in question actually didn’t know about data loss and prevention thereof (but only later confabulated that they did).
Eugine_Nier says the above is explained by akrasia: the people did know about data loss and prevention, but didn’t take action.
These are contradictory explanations.
Both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier seem to suggest, by their tone (“Classic hindsight bias”, “That’s just akrasia”) that their respective explanations are obvious.
What’s going on?
I meant less that the explanation was obvious and more that it was a very good example of the effect of hindsight bias; hindsight bias produces precisely these kinds of results.
If something else is even more likely to produce this kind of result, then that would be more likely than hindsight bias. I don’t think akrasia qualifies.
To elaborate on what I think was actually going on: People ‘know’ that failure is a possibility, something that happens to other people, and that backups are a good way to prevent it, but don’t really believe that it is a thing that can happen to them. After the fact, hindsight bias transforms ‘yeah, that’s a thing that happens’ to ‘this could happen to me’ retroactively, and they remember knowing/believing it could happen to them.
Limits of language, I think. Both explanations are possible, giving what the parent post said; both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier may have had experience with similar cases caused, respectively, by hindsight bias and akrasia, which makes their explanation appear obvious to them.
A lot of the time, I’ve noticed that “it’s obvious” means “I have seen this pattern before (sometimes multiple times), and this extra element is part of the same pattern every time that I have seen it”
Well, it depends on what precisely we mean by them “knowing” about data loss.
Classic hindsight bias. If you went to a representative sample of similar people who had not recently suffered a backup-requiring event, they would probably think the second version, not the first.
Hindsight bias is almost certainly a component. Plus, I was a friendly member of their in-group, providing free assistance with a major problem, so they had two strong reasons to be extra-agreeable.
Even so, in my experience, your second sentence does not match reality. As in, doing exactly that does not in fact yield responses skewing toward the second option, even among the very non-tech-savvy. Many of them don’t know exactly how to set such a thing up (but know they could give a teenager $20 to do it for them, which falls under “trivial inconveniences”), but the idea is not new info to them.
My sample size here is small and demographically/geographically limited, so add as many grains of salt as you see fit.
That’s just akrasia.
Well, look, of course I’d prefer to sell the customer something. If, knowing this, you take everything out of my mouth to be a lie, then you are not, in fact, being rational. The fact that I would specifically say “buy it elsewhere if you like!”, and offer to set the backup system up for free, ought to tell you something.
The other part of this is that the place where I worked was a small, privately owned shop, many of whose customers were local, and which made a large chunk (perhaps the majority) of its revenue from service. (Profit margins on Apple machines are very slim.) It was to our great advantage not to lie to people in the interest of selling them one more widget. Doing so would have been massively self-defeating. As a consequence of all of this, our regular customers generally trusted us, and were quite right to do so.
Finally, even if the customer decided that the chance was too great that I was trying to sell them something, and opted not to buy anything on the spot, it is still ridiculously foolish not to follow up on the salesperson’s suggestion that you do something to protect yourself from losing months or years of work. If that is even a slight possibility, you ought to investigate, get second and third opinions, get your backup solution as cheaply as you like, and then take me up on my offer to install it for free (or have a friend install it). To not back up at all, because clearly the salesperson is lying and the truth must surely be the diametrical opposite of what they said, is a ludicrously bad plan.
It tells customers something, but considering that these are plausible marketing techniques, it’s not very strong evidence.
If you tell the customers that something is really important, that they should buy it, even if from somewhere else, this signals trustworthiness and consideration, but it’s a cheap signal considering that if they decide, right in your store, to buy a product which your store offers, they probably will buy it from you unless they’re being willfully perverse. Most of the work necessary to get them to buy the product from you is done in convincing them to buy it at all, and nearly all the rest is done by having them in your store when you do it.
Offering to provide services for free is also not very strong evidence, because in marketing, “free” is usually free*, a foot-in-the-door technique used to extract money from customers via some less obvious avenue. Indeed, the customers might very plausibly reason that if the service was so important that they would be foolish to do without it, you wouldn’t be offering it for free.
Given that setting up backups on a Mac is so easy that, as I suggested in my quoted spiel, the customer could even do it themselves, this is not a very well-supported conclusion.
Well, duh. You “extract” money from customers by the fact of them liking you, trusting you, and getting all their service done at your shop, and buying future things they need from you, also.
I think you underestimate how doggedly many people hunt for deals. I don’t even blame them; being a retail shop, my place of work sometimes couldn’t compete with mail-order houses on prices.
You’re right, though: if they decided then and there that they would buy the thing, the customers often in fact went ahead and bought it then and there.
But you might plausibly think “hmm, suspicious. I’ll wait to buy this until I can do some research.” Fine and well; that’s exactly what I’d do. Do the research. Buy the thing online. But dismissing the entire notion, based on the idea that “bah, he was just trying to sell me something”, is foolishness.
The customer is estimating the probability that the statement is a sales pitch. The fact that many people would hunt for deals affects the effectiveness of the sales pitch given that it is one, not the likelihood that the statement is a sales pitch in the first place. Those are two different things—it’s entirely possible that the statement is probably a sales pitch, but the sales pitch only catches 20% of the customers.
Yes; that comment was a response to your scenario whereby someone has already decided to purchase the item. You asserted that said person would then surely purchase it in the store, at the moment of the decision to purchase. I claimed that some people are too keen on getting a good deal to do that, opting instead to wait and buy it mail-order or online.
This is unrelated to the probability of my statements being a sales pitch.
Thus, a person might think: “Hmm, is this merely a sales pitch? Perhaps; but even if it is, and it succeeds in convincing me to buy a backup device, I might well still not buy it here and now, because I really want a good deal.” They might then conclude: “And so, given that the salesman knows this, and is nonetheless insistent that I should buy it — and is even encouraging me to buy it elsewhere if it’ll get me to buy it at all — I should take his words seriously; at least, seriously enough to look into it further.”
That’s Pascal’s Mugging. You’re suggesting that because the purported consequence of not having a backup is large, even if the probability is small, the customer should make an expenditure (do research) on it.
All of this seems like a fully general counterargument to doing anything that any salespeople tell you to do, ever.
One imagines that some of those customers who later returned to angrily and tearfully demand data recovery, followed something like your line of reasoning, and decided not to back up their data. As a result, they are now sitting on top of their giant pile of utility.
… oh wait.
Do you think it’s just chance that following your logic leads you to lose, in this case? And not just lose: be almost guaranteed to lose, if in fact you have something to lose. (All hard drives fail. All of them. It’s just a matter of time.)
It is sometimes smart to do something that a salesperson tells you to do. But you shouldn’t do it because the salesperson tells you; the fact that the salesperson tells you to do it is not very useful information.
They had no reason to believe the salesperson’s advice was good. The fact that the salesperson’s advice was good, and following it would have left them better off, doesn’t change this. It just makes it a case of bad luck. Saying “If they had followed the advice of that salesman they’d have been better off, so they should have listened to that salesman” is like saying “if they had followed the advice of that tea leaf reader, they’d have been better off, so they should have listened to that tea leaf reader.”
Yeah, exactly. In that particular case, you’re either savvy enough and you know that you should backup your data (in which case you’re likely to buy backup storage from someone other than overpriced Apple), OR you’re not savvy enough, in which case you have to take it on faith that e.g. hard drives break down often enough, that there’s no existing built-in redundancy to begin with, that the backup solution actually works, etc etc.
edit: Besides, good hard drives have yearly probability of failure of less than 5%, so the data better be simultaneously worth several hundred bucks and not be worth sharing with other people, copying to other computers, etc.
It might be worth mentioning here that cheap external hard drives are crap. I’ve made a practice for the last few years of using them for backups and anything else I need a terabyte drive for (mostly media storage), and in that time I’ve lost three of them, about one every year and a half. I haven’t lost an internal drive since about 1995.
The usual point of failure seems to be the backplane rather than the drive itself, though. So the data’s recoverable as long as it’s not hardware encrypted.
What do you think “backing up” means, exactly?
It’s not some tech magic that only happens in the presence of certain specific, specially sanctified, pieces of equipment. If you have your data in more than one place, such that if one location goes down, the data still exists elsewhere — congratulations, your data is backed up.
However, if we’re talking about a full backup, then there’s also another consideration:
It’s not just the data, it’s also your time.
Without a Time Machine backup
Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You then have to spend the next several days:
a) reinstalling your operating system; b) reinstalling all of your programs; c) performing all software updates; d) reconstructing all of your application-specific settings and other aspects of your configuration.
With a Time Machine backup
Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You boot from your system DVD or recovery partition and click the button to restore from backup. In an hour or two, as if by magic, your system is fully restored to its state as of the last backup, data, applications, settings, and all.
If your data plus at least a day, usually several days, of time lost, is not worth even one hundred dollars (which is how much a terabyte hard drive plus external enclosure costs these days), then I suppose you’re not doing anything of particular value with your time and you may freely ignore my advice.
You forgot the division by the probability of this happening.
I’m not saying backups are not worth it, I do backup my system, what I am saying is that it’s not necessarily the case that backups are worth it for your regular person that doesn’t customize things a lot, doesn’t have much valuable data, uses very few programs regularly, and what ever valuable data they got is backed up on other computers. edit: for that matter, average person’s settings are probably of negative value to them, heh.
edit : holy cow , some drives have annual failure rate of 0.9% .
I don’t know what “regular people” you hang out with, so this might be true in your experience. When I worked retail, many of our customers were creative professionals of some sort — musicians, photographers, digital artists, writers, etc. Their computers had tons of work-relevant data.
Another example: my mother, certainly a “regular person” insofar as she has no tech industry background, is an educator. On her computer are things like work-related documents; syllabi; curriculum design docs; teaching materials; etc. All of that is certainly valuable.
Do you actually know people who own and use a personal computer, but have no valuable data on it, or very little? Also, how do you peg the value of your Great American Novel you’ve been writing in your off time for the last three years?
I don’t really hang out with regular people generally, and I was speaking in the data by sheer tonnage. The examples you’re listing fit on a single SD card. Non computer proficient people I know are really paranoid about the computer failing so they copy their stuff onto disks manually (even though better options are available).
How much revenue in dollars do you think a typical person with failed hard drive will lose, on the average?
(The total net worth of the data I got is definitely in the six and most likely in the seven figures range in terms of total loss of revenue if i’d lost all of it, so it’s backuped rigorously of course, off site too in case of fire) edit: also I have large data that is valuable, not just photos (which people nowadays upload someplace on the internet).
What?!
<consults Newegg>
It seems you can get SDXC cards in capacities up to 256 GB… for over $600. The up-to-$100 range gets you, perhaps, 64 GB. The sort of data I refer to in my first example most certainly does not fit onto one of those; and even the largest SD cards in no way, shape, or form have the capacity to let you do a full backup (i.e., the kind that saves you all that reinstall time) on a machine you use for any kind of media work.
Well, there you go. I don’t know why you think “regular people” don’t do important, valuable things on their computer, or don’t have lots of data, but in my experience, they certainly do.
In any case, my original point remains, which is that even if you backup your several megabytes of important Word documents onto Dropbox, and that’s your entire backup strategy, and your time is so worthless to you that you don’t mind spending hours or days reinstalling...
… that’s still a backup strategy. Not backing up would still be worse.
(As an aside, measure the value of time exclusively in lost revenue has always struck me as shortsighted as heck.)
What do people do when they get a new computer, do they copy over all settings automatically, usually, or not?
The annual failure rate was 0.9% for Hitachi drives… let’s say, 1%. So, for example, if the full backup costs $100 per year, the reinstalling would needs to cost $10 000 assuming linearity. Which is an overestimate due to possibly higher probability of accidentally deleting your data with your own hands, things getting stolen, etc, yes, I know. Why you keep repeating “time is so worthless”?
In the context of you being a salesman, the regular person, they don’t know what is the failure rate of the drive, they have to trust you that it is high enough, and you being a salesman, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to trust you. You can’t somehow prove from the first principles that the rate is high enough. It is not obvious that the rate is high enough. In fact for some manufacturers the rate can well be not high enough, unless we are speaking of operating system failures, human errors, and such.
edit: misremembered some other failure rate, fixed.
edit2: to summarize, between them backing up the most valuable data manually, the low probability of failure, and their low confidence in the words of a salesman, you can have a rational decision here. (I’m of course playing the advocate for “stupid people” not present to advocate themselves)
If it’s a Mac, I think they do, because it’s so easy. In my experience they certainly do.
Uh, but if they back up their data “manually”, then they have thereby followed my advice. I don’t know why you keep drawing this distinction. My exhortations have always been to back up somehow. I never said “and you absolutely must do so with the following preapproved backup technology which you must buy, and certainly not any solution you may already have access to”.
The following are nitpicks, but still: a) not everyone has Hitachi drives; b) failure rates were higher in the past; c)
As for your monetary value argument, it ignores nonlinear marginal utility of money, risk aversion, and difficulties in translating value of time into money. (As do most such arguments.)
Ahh, ok. Albeit there’s the second point with regards to the full backup.
Yeah, I know. I’d still backup. The point is, those are variables and may differ quite a bit, especially for the full-backup advantage.
On the other side of spectrum though, I know a lawyer whose opinion is that you should not keep durable records unless you actually really need to have them. (I think he often does divorce dispute cases and such).
Interesting. That’s certainly a perspective I hadn’t considered. One sort-of-related situation is one of political dissidents, activists, etc.: such people would almost certainly not want to use Dropbox and similar cloud storage solutions for e.g. lists of contacts, but they might want more private backups (off-site over-network backup solutions, for instance) to protect data against government seizure of their computers.
Certainly, if your concern is having your data accessible by entities (such as the government) that will take coercive measures to get it, then the equation changes.
It depends on whether they consider themselves vulnerable to rubberhose cryptography. If not, they can backup encrypted files anywhere they want to, including Dropbox, etc. But if they do, then it becomes a game of steganography and the local hard drives of their machines aren’t safe either.
Indeed, although the truly paranoid may rig their hard drives to self-destruct, or take some similar measure, in the event of the police breaking down their door.
I imagine active destruction of that kind might create huge legal problems of it’s own. On the technical side you can store the key in a file you can securely destroy.
I heard somewhere that in the US and UK, an average law abiding citizen, from the formal standpoint, rather frequently breaks various laws by accident. No idea about other jurisdictions. This is why NSA is such a big deal.
If your fear of rubberhose cryptography is well-justified, “legal problems” are a minor part of your worries.
By the way, it’s hard to destroy a hard drive to the extent that a determined government wouldn’t be able to extract data from it. At least hard during the time it takes the police to break down your door.
I know I do :-)
There is this book, for example.
And, of course:
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” -- Cardinal De Richelieu
I was thinking of “or else” crypanalysis .
Interesting. I’m curious what kind of laws are frequently broken… at company level I know there’s a plenty of regulations related to health and safety which are here for a good reason when people are working with, say, dangerous machinery, but are silly in the office context.
edit: how many laws would a company break if a computer scientist replaced a light bulb?
Yeah.
Also, are you asserting that all cases of low probability of large consequences are equivalent to Pascal’s Mugging?
It’s equivalent to Pascal’s Mugging when
1) There’s a large consequence, with a low probability, and a low cost action which should be taken to avoid the consequence (or to get the consequence if it’s positive)
2) It is said that the size of the consequence makes up for the low probability, either explicitly or implicitly
3) The low probability of the large consequence has a large component consisting of uncertainty about the probability itself. This typically involves questions like “are they lying about the probability”, “are they exaggerating the probability”, or “are they mistaken about the probability”.
The difference, however, is that in Pascal’s Mugging, after you pay the mugger $5 (or whatever), you remain absolutely clueless about whether he was for real, or a swindler, and whether the threat he described had the slightest grounding in reality.
In this case, after you take the low-cost action (doing a bit of research, looking for a second opinion), you now know whether the salesman was feeding you a line of nonsense or whether he was warning you of a real threat.
In any case, I think that all you’ve shown is that declaring a situation to be a Pascal’s Mugging is not a good proxy for deciding whether you should do something.
Salesmen make lots of claims. What you suggest would mean that pretty much every time you talk to a salesman, you need to go and research all the claims the salesman makes that imply danger. In fact, by your reasoning, every time a tea leaf reader tells you to do something, you ought to research it to determine if the tea leaf reader is correct about that. After all, by your own argument, there are many cases where if you do the research you will know whether the tea leaf reader’s suggested course of action is helpful. Certainly if the tea leaf reader told you to do backups, research would tell you whether that’s true.
Salesmen often know what they’re talking about. They could be lying, or not. Tea leaf readers, however, just make stuff up.
It remains true that a customer who followed your logic would lose all their valuable data, whereas a customer who rejected your logic would have everything backed up, and lose nothing. In short: if you’re so smart, why aintcha rich? (In utilons, in this case, rather than dollars.)
Not in my experience.
Perhaps you’re going to the wrong stores?
There’s a difference between big-box stores and small mom-and-pop outfits. Of course the sales floor at Best Buy is staffed entirely by morons. That’s why we buy things on Amazon. (Well, not the only reason.)
I assure you that being knowledgeable gets you far in sales, given certain conditions.
Perhaps. I don’t go to stores (other than food) much. I can’t recall last time that I was buying something expensive and the salesman knew more about that thing than I did.
Well now, hold on. I wouldn’t expect a salesman to know more about computer technology than I do; but I’ve got a background in comp sci and IT; it would be an unreasonable expectation.
If, however, you’re an average person, a layman, and you’ve not done your own research (perhaps because you’re not savvy enough to do that, or too lazy, or something), and you go into a good tech-related store, then expecting the salesman to know more than you do is quite reasonable.
So it depends on what sorts of things you buy, and on where your own expertise lies.
Personally, the last time I went into a store and the salespeople knew more than I was in a hardware store. It was a small place in Brooklyn, strictly local, non-chain, been around as long as I can remember. Those guys really know their stuff.
Probably not :-P
The combination of salesmen telling the truth about things they know and lying about things they know is, as a whole, comparable to a tea leaf reader who neither knowingly tells the truth nor knowingly lies much..
Yes, he’d be unlucky. He’d be unlucky enough to have stumbled into one of the few rare cases where being rational produces a bad result. Being told to do backups is not a typical case of listening to a salesman (or tea leaf reader). It’s a highly unusual case.
Just because someone would have been better off if they had done action X, it does not follow that it would then have been rational to have done action X.
You got me kinda scared. I just use Evernote or wordpress for all my important writing. That should be enough, right?
Some hazards your online data are exposed to:
Your account could be hacked.
Their service could be hacked.
They might decide that you’re in breach of their ToS and close your account.
They could go out of business.
Anywhere your data are, they are exposed to some risks. The trick is to have multiple copies, such that no event short of the collapse of civilisation will endanger all of them together.
Precisely. My most immediately critical data — the stuff on which my current employment and professional success/advancement depends — exists in no less than seven places:
My desktop’s primary drive (an SSD).
My desktop’s backup hard drive.
My laptop’s primary drive (an SSD).
My laptop’s backup hard drive.
The primary drive (an SSD) of a different computer, in a different part of the country.
That computer’s backup hard drive.
A cloud-based storage service.
I worry that that’s not enough. I am considering investing in some sort of NAS, or two, and placing them in more secure areas of both of the dwellings to which I have access.
How much time are you spending keeping all of that in sync...?
Just having a lot of drives is not a good use of resources from the data protection standpoint. It ensures you protection against the catastrophic failure of one or two drives simultaneously, but you seem unprotected against most other forms of data loss: for example, silent corruption of files (what are you using to ensure integrity? I don’t see any mention of hashes or DVCSes), or mistaken deletions/modifications (what stops a file deletion from percolating through each of the 7 before you realize 6 months later that it was a critical file?).
For improving general safety, you should probably drop some of those drives in favor of adding protection in the form of read-only media and error detection + forward error correction (eg periodically making a full backup with PAR2 redundancy to BluRays), and more frequent backups to the backup drives.
Synchronization is automatic. It does not take up any of my time.
I have enough drive space to maintain backups going back several months, which protects against both file corruption (volume corruption is taken care of by redundancy) and mistaken deletion/modification. In any case, the files in question are mostly text or text-based, not binary formats, so corruption is less of a concern.
Code, specifically, is of course also kept in git repositories.
Backups to read-only media are a good idea, and I do them periodically as well (not blurays, though; DVDs or even CDs suffice, as the amount of truly critical data is not that large).
I can’t resist the temptation… :-D
“Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it”—Linus Torvalds
Certainly not.
No.
I can verify this—as an acknowledged “computer person” and “rational person”, I still didn’t back up my data, even while advising my friends that they should and they’ll be sorry when they don’t. Fortunately, my hard drive started making interesting new noises, rather than failing without warning, so I didn’t embarrass my self too badly. It is fairly common for someone to acknowledge and advise others of backing up their data, but failing to do so themselves.
I think it’s a combination of procrastination, laziness, being super-cheap, optimism/arrogance, and not having especially valuable data. Though people with valuable data do it too.
What method of backing up data do you recommend for a computer with windows? How often do you recommend doing it?
It depends on your use case. My “life work” consists exclusively of things I’ve typed. These types of files tend to be small, and lend themselves to being written in Google Documents. If I use Emacs, then the files are tiny and I back them up to Google Drive in about 2 seconds. This costs me all of $0 and is very easy.
But maybe your life work also includes a bunch of pictures documenting your experiences. These, and other large files, will quickly exceed your 15 gigs of free storage. Then you’re probably looking at an external hard drive or cloud storage. The better fit will depend on things like your internet connection, which USB standard your computer has, your tech level, how much stuff you need backed up, whether you travel a lot, whether you’ll lose or damage the external hard drive, etc.
And then just use Yvain’s method to find the best one.
Of course, there’s more elaborate solutions for power users, but by the time you’re high enough level for them, you’re a power user and don’t need to ask.
Thank you, I basically use this method now and am glad to have it corroborated by an expert.
I don’t use Windows nearly as much, but one idea (depending on use case, as zedzed said) is cloud storage. Dropbox is free up to 2 GB. Paid services exist. Synchronization is regular and automatic; some services keep some file history, as well.
(This is a stream of consciousness where I explore why I haven’t backed up my data. This proceeds in stages, with evolution to the next stage only because the writing of this comment forced me to keep going. Thus, it’s a data point in response to this comment.)
Interesting. I have a very dense ‘ugh field’ around backing up my data, come to think of it. Based on this population of one, it has nothing to do with not trusting the salesperson, or not being aware that my hard drive is going to fail.
… in fact, I know my hard drive is about to fail (upon reboot I get those dooming system error messages that cycle, etc.) and has occurred to me several times I might want to back up my data. Yes, there’s some important stuff I need to back up.
Maybe the hurdle is that most stuff on my computer is useless, and I don’t want to prioritize the material. I just want it all there if I need it, so I wish my computer wouldn’t break.
Since I know my computer is likely to break, or in case the power goes out or I accidentally close without saving, while working I save files electronically very frequently, and I make hard copies if there will be any pain within say -- 72 hours—of losing a particular document. The pain of the loss of anything later than a few days is discounted. (Is that hyperbolic discounting? Or just akrasia, as another commenter suggested?)
But I do know I won’t spend 20 minutes tomorrow investigating how to back up my hard drive. I know someone will say it is “easy”, but there will instead be some obstacle that will mean my data won’t actually get backed up and I’ll have wasted my twenty minutes. Right?
… OK, fine. (sigh) Let’s suppose my budget is $20 and 20 minutes. What should I do?
(reading online)
...OK, I buy a hard-drive, connect it with a USB, and drag and drop the files I want to save once the computer recognizes the device. Although I still need to determine which folders are worth saving, and this is a continuous, ongoing chore, there are some folders I know I need to save right away. I should go ahead and store those.
(I’ll report back tomorrow whether this back-up actually happened.)
Others have mentioned Dropbox, but it’s so wonderful I’ll mention it again. Dropbox. It’s almost as awesome in its just-works-ness as Time Machine (Apple’s awesome backup solution). Free up to 2GB, $10/month gets you 100GB. Runs on everything.
Note that Dropbox isn’t designed as a backup solution, it’s really for sharing files across multiple devices. It only preserves the current version of a file, so offers no protection against deleting a file you didn’t mean to. As soon as you edit a file, the changes are uploaded to the Dropbox cloud.
A point to remember is that every backup solution protects against some threats but not others, and you have to decide what you need to defend against. I have a Time Capsule (external drive for Time Machine backup), but it’s in the same room as the computer, so it provides excellent protection against disc failure or accidental deletion, but none against theft. So I also have an external drive that I plug in once a week and the rest of the time leave hidden elsewhere. If the files on your computer are your livelihood, you need an off-site backup to survive risks such as your house burning down, or serious burglars doing a complete house clearance.
A backup solution that presents a continuous, ongoing chore is not going to work. It has to be something that once you set it up, Just Works. I don’t know if there’s anything as awesome as Time Machine in this respect for Windows. Ideally a solution should automatically backup everything, except possibly some things you specifically exclude. If you only back up things you specifically decide to, you will inevitably leave things out, that you’ll only discover when you need the backup you don’t have.
Dropbox actually does version control, which has saved several files I’ve accidentally deleted or overwritten. It’s only up to 30 days, though.
I take it you’ve got a Windows or Linux machine? Because if you have a Mac, there’s a much easier solution. Edit: I mean easier than a continuous, ongoing chore of deciding what files to save, drag-and-dropping stuff, etc. You do still need to buy a device, though. For a $20 budget I recommend this 32 GB USB flash drive.
I have a Windows machine, but I know there are automatic back-up schedules that can be done. I just don’t want to do it… I don’t want to think about a complex automatic process or make decisions about scheduling. Trying to pinpoint why … it feels messy and discontinuous and inconvenient, to keep saving iterations of all my old junk.
When dealing with old data, what I find most stressful is deciding which things to keep. So as far as possible I don’t. It’s a wasted effort. I keep everything, or I delete everything. It doesn’t matter that there’s gigabytes of stuff on my machine that I’ll never look at, as long as I never have to see it or think about it. Disc space is measured in terabytes these days.
In case this wasn’t clear, for the benefit of any Mac users reading this:
Time Machine makes all these decisions for you. That’s one of the things that makes it awesome.
This.
Typically when I change machines, the data from the old one goes into the /old folder on the new one. You get a nesting hierarchy and down at the bottom there are some files from many years ago that I would need to get a simulator to even read :-/
So that’s what I am going to do. I actually ordered an external hard drive, and every few weeks I’ll back up my hard drive. The whole thing (no decisions).
I also understand that I don’t need to worry about versions—the external hard drive just saves the latest version.
I also talked to a friend today and found out they backed their data regularly. I was surprised; didn’t know regular people did this regularly.
Backups aren’t about saving your old junk. Backup are about saving everything that you have on your hard drive in case it goes to the Great Write-Only Memory In The Sky.
If you’re talking about staggered backups or snapshots, their usefulness lies mostly in being a (very primitive) versioning system, as well as a possible lifeline in case your data gets silently corrupted and you don’t notice fast enough.
Well, the way it works on the Mac — and I’m only describing this because I speculate that similar, if not quite as awesome, solutions exist for Windows — is this:
Scheduling: backups happen every hour if the backup drive is plugged in; or, whenever you plug it in; plus, you can trigger them manually. You pretty much don’t have to think about it; just either keep the thing plugged in (easy with a desktop), or plug it in once in a while.
Multiple iterations of your stuff: there’s a “history” of backups, maintained automatically. You can go back to any backed-up prior version (to a certain point; how long a history you can keep is dictated by available storage space). The interface for restoring things hides the messy complexity of the multiple versions from you, and just lets you go back to the latest version, or any previous available version, sorted by time.
With good backup software, it’s really quite smooth and easy. The process is not complex; decisions to be made are minimal; your backup feels nice and non-messy; restoring is easy as pie.
Unfortunately I can’t recommend good Windows backup software, but maybe someone else can chime in.