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PSA: Back Up Your Shit

242 pointsby mfinchamover 11 years ago

27 comments

steven2012over 11 years ago
I think that the beauty of Snapchat is that it frees you from this ridiculous notion that a text, IM, Facebook message, etc, has any value.<p>In my opinion, it doesn&#x27;t. Also, in my opinion, I believe that feeling the need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense of self-worth, and that everything you say has value and needs to be saved.<p>I never, ever peruse through my messages, to reminisce over an old conversation. It&#x27;s too much navel-gazing to suit my sense of pride. What actually matters is the actual relationship you have with a person, which is built on the BODY of IMs, messages, conversations, visits, dinners, parties, etc, that you shared with that person. Sometimes, it&#x27;s best to leave good conversations in the blurry past, and just remember that a certain person is funny, a great conversationalist, etc.<p>I&#x27;m doing the same sort of thing with Google now. I will disallow anyone I&#x27;m in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. When we talk, it&#x27;s about whatever resides in our own brains, be it good, bad or ugly. The entertaining part of any conversation is the actual conversation, the passion, the humor, etc. If all we wanted to do was pass around facts, then we can forward each other URLs and be done with it. When I&#x27;m talking with someone over dinner, we&#x27;re not hammering out a contract that requires precision, we&#x27;re having a conversation over ideas, and as funny as it sounds, facts aren&#x27;t as important as the spirit of the conversation. Unless of course you&#x27;re in an argument with someone, and then that isn&#x27;t very much fun so why even bother starting the conversation in the first place.
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famousactressover 11 years ago
Thanks for this. The SMS export from iPhone is something I&#x27;ve been looking for. One of the most important relationships and experiences of my entire life has been documented (trapped) in my phone and it&#x27;s backups ever since.<p>I&#x27;m looking forward to seeing how well it works, specifically whether it can pull photos&#x2F;videos as well. If it doesn&#x27;t yet but it wouldn&#x27;t be too much trouble to add, I&#x27;d be willing to literally pay you to add that.<p>[Edit: Since a lot of the other comments are questioning the value of saving this stuff I figured I&#x27;d share my use cases. It turned out when I thought about it I have at least three:<p>1. I effectively met my wife on myspace (believe it or not a pretty nasty software bug led to our relationship) and an enormous amount of our initial friendship and courtship ended up documented there. Years ago I painstakingly clicked through for hours and copy-pasted the conversation to a text document.<p>2. I had a close friend die very suddenly and at a young age. My memory generally kind of stinks and I hated that there were conversations with him that I half-remembered. I went back through social media conversations with him (again, mostly on myspace) a lot in the years that followed. It helped me piece together memories that are very important to me now.<p>3. This past year my wife and I adopted our daughter. Our relationship with her birthmother has primarily been via SMS and the months that followed were a really exhausting and beautiful blur. It&#x27;s really important to us that we&#x27;re able to share that thread with our daughter someday.<p>In none of these cases did I see it coming that these services would end up having such valuable content in them for me. I didn&#x27;t know I&#x27;d meet my wife. I&#x27;ll never know when the last time I talk to someone is, and I would have never guessed that one of the most important things I&#x27;ll have to give my daughter about her birth story is an SMS conversation.<p>So yeah, having access to this stuff is important to me. Thanks to jwz for pulling these resources together. ]
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borskiover 11 years ago
&quot;You don&#x27;t just throw your letters in the trash. You might want them some day.&quot;<p>Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but I actually &#x2F;do&#x2F; throw my letters in the trash. I &#x2F;do&#x2F; treat Twitter, etc. as ephemeral and passing. I don&#x27;t care about saving those messages. Am I the only one?
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enigmabombover 11 years ago
PSA: This guy&#x27;s nightclub makes a really mean meatball sandwich.<p>Make sure that recipe is backed up.
ThatGeoGuyover 11 years ago
I hate to be that guy who plugs his own crap everywhere, but I actually wrote my own blog post recently about backing up my stuff on Linux.<p>My setup is fairly rudimentary, and I had the help of a friend on IRC, but here&#x27;s the link if anyone is interested in setting up something simple for a Linux workstation at home or a VPS you can ssh into (really, as long as you can SSH into it with rsync, my method will work). I&#x27;d also love any feedback HN can give regarding my mechanism. Hell, if you wanted to fully back up a phone and sdcard on your desktop, you could probably do something similar with &quot;adb pull&quot; or the like.<p><a href="https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/posts/howto-encrypted-backups-in-debian-linux/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thatgeoguy.ca&#x2F;blog&#x2F;posts&#x2F;howto-encrypted-backups-in-...</a><p>That out of the way, I&#x27;m often surprised by how often I have to remind either myself or others to make good backups. Phone&#x27;s aside, there&#x27;s been enough times where I&#x27;ve nuked my system that backing up all my files should be secondhand at this point. Thankfully, I have a decent system set up now, but I still consider it rough around the edges (especially considering how long archiving backups takes).
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randomdrakeover 11 years ago
Accessing your own data and storing it is great, but there&#x27;s still the matter of backing it up. jwz wrote a good guide for that as well. It&#x27;s linked in the article, but not in a way that makes it obvious. Thought it would be good to mention it here:<p><a href="http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;backups.html</a>
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dkokelleyover 11 years ago
Honestly, my Twitter feed, Facebook, and SMS records could all disappear tomorrow, and I would be OK with it. Maybe there&#x27;s value in my accumulated Facebook connections and history, but most of the value today comes from current content.<p>Now email, that I value for archival.
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gwu78over 11 years ago
&quot;Remember: if it&#x27;s not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it&#x27;s not really yours.&quot;<p>So, if we store our data in &quot;the cloud&quot;, it&#x27;s not really ours?
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sturmehover 11 years ago
Chat history serves one purpose for me, the file size quantifies how much I spend talking to a particular person, and I use that to sort people on my contact list.
aestraover 11 years ago
I want to have some record of some things but not everything by far. For example, I wouldn&#x27;t want a record of everything I ever did recorded, but my dad used to walk around once in a while with a video recorder on special times when everyone gathered (birthdays, holidays...) and looking at those artifacts of life from almost 30(!!) years ago is priceless. Many people in those tapes have died since then, and I&#x27;m glad they exist. I save a few letters and emails, but not all or even many. I was going back and reading an email I sent a friend about getting together with an ex and seeing the perspective I had on things back then was... weird. When I was in high school (before cell phones or text messages) people passed notes in class, and some of my friends still have a box full of them. They are relics of the past. They take up space, and you probably won&#x27;t want ALL of them, but I think it is worth keeping a few. I wish I kept one or two. I can&#x27;t imagine the vacant things mine would have contained. I mean, I still have my yearbooks, I didn&#x27;t throw those out... same kinda thing really.
anigbrowlover 11 years ago
<i>These conversations aren&#x27;t ephemeral and disposable, they are your life, and you want to save them forever.</i><p>Yes they are, and no I don&#x27;t. I highly doubt JWZ carries a portable recorder to immortalize all his in-person conversations; I certainly don&#x27;t, even though recording people (for movies) is what I do for a living. Funnily enough, far more of my important memories involve real-life conversations than exchanges on IRC&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;HN.<p>Yeah,. it&#x27;s good to have a method of backing this stuff up if you do need it, eg for business communications or any number of other use cases. But most digital chatter is eminently disposable I <i>wish</i> there was a way to have emails expire and self-destruct automatically, so that things like time-sensitive sales offers would quietly vanish once the actionable date had passed unless I made some special effort to retain them.
flipstewartover 11 years ago
I do throw away letters. I&#x27;d rather not live in the past or cling to ephemera for emotional reasons, thank you.
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Ellipsis753over 11 years ago
I&#x27;m on Gentoo Linux and had my Skype settings set to never delete chat logs. After a couple of months these logs were in the tens of gigabytes. The strange thing is that I rarely even chat on Skype. This should be tens of gigabytes of just text chat. Well it&#x27;s not any format that I can understand (and Skype lags badly and becomes pretty much unusable if I type &#x2F;history to look at the logs) so I&#x27;ve had to delete them and for a while now Skype only stores the last month of chat. I can&#x27;t think why the logs got so big. Perhaps Skype trys to optimize them for quick searches or something?<p>Anyway, does anyone know of a way to back up Skype text chats? They shouldn&#x27;t have to use up this much space. (And ideally I should actually be able to load them up and read them too!)
dhughesover 11 years ago
Pictures are the worst for backing up, actually no backing up someone else&#x27;s pictures is worse.<p>Parents for example, my mom takes a lot of pictures she wants to keep I take lots of pictures I don&#x27;t care about.<p>Semi-wheneverly when I manage to get the card from the parent&#x27;s camera or cellphone to back up it&#x27;s usually a mess of I backed up 63% of these so which ones are new. Is IMG0003.JPG the same as IMG0003.JPG I saved already wait no one is 2MB and the other is 3.25MB.<p>Meld helps but it&#x27;s the same thing what do I have and what is new and what is different with the same name but is different which I just happen to notice due to the file size.<p>So I end up dumping it all onto something or multiple somethings and swear I&#x27;ll figure it out next time. Goto step 1.
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codvaover 11 years ago
I delete all email after 90 days, unless I explicitly moved it to an archive folder.<p>I&#x27;ve never event thought about saving IMs, texts, Twitter, etc. Civilization has survived a very long time without a written record of every conversation ever. It will continue to do so.
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X-Istenceover 11 years ago
The SMS backup tool for iPhone doesn&#x27;t seem to work for me. I have encrypted backups turned on for my iPhone, will this not work because of that?
ballardover 11 years ago
Backup personal stuff and code to Tarsnap. Videos would be too expensive, but downsampled home videos might be worth saving too.
mathrawkaover 11 years ago
Totally off topic, but the I can read the site fine, but if I switch back to white color site (like HN, or just staring at a wall), my eyes still see the lines of the site for awhile.<p>It physically affects my vision for a few minutes, albeit just a little bit. Is this normal?
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Alohaover 11 years ago
It drives me nuts that pidgin and adium use different logging interfaces - its made switching from Windows to OSX more painful - as I still use finch on Linux, and use file syncing to sync logs and config files across platforms.
FollowSteph3over 11 years ago
I view this as no different than backng up phone calls. And most people don&#x27;t care to back up their phone calls. Just because you can doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s always worth it...
davidgerardover 11 years ago
Inspired by this, I went and downloaded all my tweets last night.<p>Then I looked through them. I can assure you that tweets may not be ephemeral, but they are most certainly disposable.
normlomanover 11 years ago
Always back up online chats so you can blackmail the participants with embarrassing or incriminating statements they made.
qwertaover 11 years ago
On android you just mount phone partition and query SQLite tables.
jherikoover 11 years ago
along these lines i&#x27;d highly recommend: <a href="http://socialsafe.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;socialsafe.net&#x2F;</a>
mmanfrinover 11 years ago
PSA: It is not 1999, please don&#x27;t use neon green text on a black background as your color scheme for text.
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LeicaLatteover 11 years ago
Social media is just excreta of human activity on the internet. Why back that up? Lame.
bestspellcasterover 11 years ago
I want to use this opportunity to thank drstanleyspelltemple@hotmail.com for helping me get my lover back after he left me few months ago. I have sent friends and my brothers to beg him for me but he refused and said that it is all over between both of us but when I met this Dr. Stanley, he told me to relaxed that every thing will be fine and after three days and contacted him, I got my man back......Caitlin