Another year rolls around, and I yet again find myself facing an onslaught of “world backup day” posts. So yet again, I put on my fiercest Ye-Olde-Unix-Veteran expression and encourage all you young-uns to sit down and hear what I have to say about this ‘world backup day’ thing.
I’m not a fan of world backup day. This is probably where you sit back and say “your Twitter handle is backupbear, you write books about backup and this blog is all about backup, you’re just being obstreperous”.
And might seriously think you’re right in that assessment. Except, well, you’re wrong – it’s much more than me being stubborn (otherwise I’d have probably given up years ago in return for payment consisting of a nice bottle of gin, and a really good steak and vegemite sandwich).
You see, every time world backup day rolls along, I find myself thinking that we should be past the need to encourage people to backup. This is not a conversation we should continue to need. Yes, we need to converse about how you backup or where you backup, but … I’m tired. I’m tired of having that discussion about whether you need to backup in the first place.
We are digital citizens. Good grief, we know things can go wrong: who these days hasn’t accidentally deleted a video, or had a sync problem that trashed some photos, had a memory card fail in a camera, dragged the wrong files to the trash, or accidentally erased a production database thinking they were logged on to the test server, but X11 focus-follows-mouse and a shambling keyboard pointing-stick mouse resulted in the wrong window being selected when you typed in “rm *.dbf”?
(OK, maybe the last one is just me. I hope so: I definitely understood the phrase, “Gibbering in terror” after that event.)
I dislike world backup day because I’m sick of the 101-level conversation, “Why do I need to backup?” In fact, in a digital era, it’s not even a 101-level conversation any more. Backing up should be something as basic and as natural to the digital citizen as breathing. Look, I know you can’t win against the laws of thermodynamics (at least certainly not in our current understanding of physics), and that eventually, entropy always wins, but do we really have to hasten it along by thinking we’ve done enough to remind people at least once a year of the need to backup?
No, we can do better. We should do better. We must do better because if we don’t, we risk losing so much. Think of it this way: when I was growing up, the only time I heard about someone losing all the family photos and memories was when their house caught on fire and that box of photos, treasured and added to for decades, was destroyed. I remember a teacher once describing that sensation: walking back into had been her living room, seeing the glass from the chandelier melted into long fragile strands kissing the ground, knowing that some of the ashes she was walking through were the only photos they’d had of grandparents: memories forever lost.
But now we can lose our history so much easier than house fires.
New phone, who dis?
We make memories faster in the digital age. Or more correctly, we accumulate memories faster in the digital age. Some even argue that our minds no longer end at the boundaries of our skull, and to be perfectly honest, I fall into that camp myself.
Oh, and here they come. The human race. The end comes, as it was always going to, down a video phone.
Doctor Who, “The Eleventh Hour”
Forget about business for a moment and continue on my thought train here with me. Our memories are increasingly becoming digital. My husband and I got married at the end of November 2018 and it didn’t matter that the video recording we’d setup for the wedding didn’t work because almost every second person recorded it on their phones.
I have a collection of scanned, old family photos stored on one of my RAID volumes. There’s maybe 150-200 photos ranging from me in my teenage years back down through to great-grandparents. But that collection is utterly dwarfed by the thousands of photos and videos on my current mobile phone. As of this morning, there’s 8,357 memories in my camera roll on this phone. I’ve got archives sitting on my computer going back to the first iPhone 3G photos I took. Between digital camera photos and SmartPhone photos I’ve probably got a hundred thousand or more photos – memories – stored in a variety of places. My cats, who both have fewer years ahead of them than they do behind, have easily featured in 10,000-15,000 of those photos I’ve got stored.
We accumulate memories faster than ever before.
We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.
Charlie Chaplain, “The Great Dictator”
In want of a good backup policy. (Well, among other things.)
I’m not against world backup day because I think backup is a waste of time, I’m against world backup day because it’s paying attention to the problem at the wrong time. Every day should be world backup day because any time we get a new device – be it laptop, desktop, phone, tablet, whatever – backup should be automatic. Automatic for us, and automatically enabled. Otherwise we just keep on inviting digital entropy into our lives. Business is a different scenario: the mechanics of backup and data protection are different there than they are for consumers, but I’ll also say I’m getting a little tired in business of having to have that “why do I need to backup?” discussion, too.
Backup needs to be an ethos.
That is, backup needs to become an ingrained part of our characters, if we’re going to prosper, either as digital natives or digital immigrants. It doesn’t matter what generation you come from, backup affects you. And we fix this not by having world backup day but by having the conversation earlier. As a backup expert I shouldn’t ever need to have a pre-101 “why do I need to backup?” conversation with a customer because the fundamental ethos of backing up should be ingrained in what we do: kids should learn in school of the importance of backing up, devices should automatically prompt for backup when you first configure them, their “getting started” information should cover off backing up, and if you’re in a store trying to choose between an iPhone and a Nokia (or any other model, as silly as the rest are) the sales person should say at some point, “Now regardless of what you get, you need to make sure you do backups, OK?”
DOCTOR: Now, listen. Remember what I told you when you were seven?
Doctor Who, “The Big Bang”
AMY: What did you tell me?
DOCTOR: No. No, that’s not the point. You have to remember.
AMY: Remember what? Doctor? Doctor?
I tell my customers: I’m passionate about data protection. For me it’s not an action or a reaction, but it’s become an ethos in how I go about not just my work, but my life. Cynically you might think “that’s because the most humiliating thing for an author about backup would be to lose something”, and I’d certainly agree it would be an ignominious thing to have to admit, but that implies I’m doing backup because I want to. No: I do backup because I need to. And so do you.
World backup day is a reaction, but backup needs to be an ethos. Not just my ethos, but everyone’s.