Monkey Down...Lessons Learned

I've always saved important digital info to a LOCAL backup, sometimes two.

 

You mean my erudite fascinating posts could have been lost forever???

I back up my more contentious posts jjust in case they get moderated out of existence.

 

Thank you for all the hard work. Trying to get all the resources I want on memory sticks and then onto hard drive with EMP storage spare hard drive. Not really RAID storage, but different systems. Learned the hard way over last 30 years that I don't want systems, I want files. DOS games anyone? Loved them but didn't translate well into new systems, and so on.

Bison Prepper talks about the internet kill switch. Doesn't matter if it exists or not, crashes, system changes, providers merging and going out of business, hackers, government control and peeking, etc, as far as I am concerned, if it isn't on a file on a hard storage device that is separate from the internet and totally under my control, it is only a handy way to pass time. The Squirrel, the loss of Jerry's site, a hacker attack that crashed my system, changing systems from Digital, IBM, and all the Microsoft changes, have forced me to store things I want as files or PDF's on my own systems and to treat all the rest as handy tools to browse, assemble and collect information.

Don't believe in nor use the cloud, all my friends using their tablets with almost no on device storage, may well see the cloud vanish over the horizon and also have the added benefit of everyone being able to see their cloud information and search thru it at will.

 

The cloud technologies allow me to be paid quite well: but I don't trust them as far as I can throw them. EVERYTHING that isn't local, and disconnected doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned. Hard copies are the best, followed by USB sticks, and elderly, but easy to connect and read IDE drives. As an old friend, ex-US Army Intel told me - "a computer with a bullet hole in it is a door stop. A map or other document with the same hole is still a map."

 

Backed up to 3 two terabyte external hard drives kept in different physical locations that I frequent. And am printing out as FRN's are available for ink and paper.

 

If everything does fall apart, for the long run the one book of tech I hope makes it after all the computers die, is Grey's Book of Anatomy, might not recreate civilization, but would keep a lot of people alive, that and the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. I hope that in the long run, the whole electronics-computer thing actually means something. Never forgot that we forgot how to make concrete for over 1,000 years and that the billions that have died over time, from the works of Marx, different religious leaders, different demigogs, etc.

 

I'm keeping my tin foil hat by the way

 

I have maybe 500 files on pin drives and two systems....

 

I save and backup all the pictures I post on my coffee thread.

 

Maintain a backup contact list that you can reach by telephone or letter.

 

So while the site was unreachable I spent that much more time on HF. When I do run across a tidbit I print it, 3 hole punch it and put it in a notebook, one of ten on the shelf each devoted to a topic. I will always prefer paper copies of things to electromagnetic storage. I work in the IT world and know just how easy a bad RAID controller can eliminate years of archived data. I also never trust anything connected to the internet, that has been connected to the internet, or that was downloaded from the internet, after our company finding a trojan written by an employee that fired after 7 years and did substantial damage. Nothing caught it until it reached it's activation date.

 

Thumb drives now that they have massive capacity, a external hard drive, and I archive a lot of stuff on my website server way more storage and bandwidth on it than I need now days.