I says, Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Don't hang around 'cause two's a crowd
On my cloud, baby
In southern MN the local radio station was all local stuff, including things like "Party Line" a radio-hosted classified ad program. "Size 10 gym shoes are $6.00. Call FRE-1234." You get the idea. During the day WDGY a big AM station 100 miles north on the southern edge of Minneapolis would blast out the popular pop music of the day, but it was full of ads. Late at night you could pull Beaker Street from WLS in Chicago, well worth the illogic of staying up that late. WLS worked just fine during the years working nights at Universal Milking Machine, giving good reason to drive around aimlessly in my '66 VW for several hours after getting off work at midnight.
Well, the Rolling Stones were blasting out memorable tunes about the cloud then and here we are.
Between my full-time gig which was 60+ hours a week and then the small business which kept me up at night...and day...and weekends my personal focus on computer/digital backups was neglected. The small business has been sold. Great.
For the past few days I've been reviewing my data repositories, backup plans and where should I be putting files going forward. With critical documents and photos you just don't want to lose those with a drive/PC failure/upgrade. So running through my PCs in most frequent use: 1) Chromebook. This is not a problem. It's the PC of choice about 80% of the time and I use Google Docs & Sheets and a few other products storing all files on the Google Drive. Nothing downloaded lost would be a problem.
In the desktop space we have a legacy PC running XP. My backup strategy there is to periodically plug in a USB drive, copy the user files and then upload that to Dropbox. Desktop #2 is a Windows 7 running Backblaze as the backup. Backblaze is a wonderful backup product less focused on file sharing. Windows backup is not enabled on this PC due to a faulty registry entry which crashes the task scheduler; this is a frequent reminder that Windows PCs are often more expensive and complex than warranted. Desktop #3 was running out of space. Oddly two years ago this was going to be my primary workstation. Being obsessively concerned about loss I was running a Backblaze backup and a Mozy backup. Getting ready to do my 2017 business and personal taxes I felt this PC to be a big short of free space...and almost bought another box but caution and a frugal nature intervene. After a certain level of analysis it became clear that I'd saved at least two images between the resident drive and an attached USB drive and I'd been running Windows backup to the USB drive. Some of that was saved to Dropbox folders and thus saved repeatedly, you know, like holding up a mirror to a mirror. Three backup solutions was probably two too many.
There are a number of notebooks lying about none of which are backed up, simply re-imaged when becoming problematic. My professional notebook, the one I use when being...well, professional is backed up to Sugarsync. So now I'm up to four backup strategies, three too many. Oh, I also have been a longtime Dropbox user. Initially this allowed me to stop carrying a PC everywhere but simply leaving a PC where ever I was headed. The challenge in file syncning solutions is to ensure that you are seting your syncning preferences with some logic. It's also really easy to delete needed files and directories and screw yourself everywhere. With most of the synchnng oriented solutions deleted files are kept for 30 days. Personally I've found that I discover the need for deleted files after about six months.
I did not mention a drawer full of usb drives, numerous USB sticks, SD cards, micro SD cards and Seagate SAN with really old stuff.
The only reason for retaining the XP PC is because it has a diskette drive and I still find a box here and there of mystery files.
There are as many sites comparing options for backup and syncing as there are options for backup and syncing. If I wasn't trying to work with the five currently in my 'personal cloud' I'd review some of those sites and make a good decision.
