Can't live without it (2)

[ewx]

Comments:

• Four people apparently have exactly one irreplaceable thing. I'm curious what it is l-)
• Quite a few people don't have backups despite having lost data because of it. Perhaps they now have nothing left that's irreplaceable, but apart from that, what are you people thinking?
• Lots of people have lost data because their backups failed; which points out a question I missed, whether people test their backups - untested backups having a nasty little habit of turning out not to work, or not containing the files you thought they did.
• Another arguably missing question was about whether you'd actually be able to replace replaceable things - I couldn't afford to replace my house on my own if it burned down, but it's insured against that. (You can't conveniently test this kind of backup, but you don't hear so many stories of people's home insurance turning out not to work as you do data backups.)

Comments

[mair_in_grenderich]

- I don't/didn't have room to back things up, and some of the things I used to have have disappeared. I've never lost anything like a phd thesis (never had one of those to lose...) but occasional things of some sentimental value. I found an old backup CD a few months ago which was fascinating...

Anyway, once you fail to back things up, lose stuff, and discover your life is going on much the same anyway, the motivation gets less...

[j4.livejournal.com]

Not everything that's irreplaceable is important or worth replacing, and therefore may not be worth the effort of trying to avoid losing it.

e.g. emails if not backed up are probably irreplaceable (unless the sender happens to have kept them in their sent-mail & can find them when asked), but if I lost one, it's unlikely that I'd mind overmuch; if I lost the lot, I'd probably feel bad about it, but in practice it wouldn't really affect me that much.

I probably should back up more things than I do, though.

[j4.livejournal.com]

not ... worth the effort of trying to avoid losing it

Sorry, that makes it sound like it's not worth keeping at all... I guess what I mean is that the risk and/or impact of losing it may be perceived to be small, and the effort of extra protection may be perceived to be large, & therefore one might not bother. IYSWIM.

I think I need more coffee.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Certainly one might think the risk of losing it was small, and so not do anything about it, but in the case of people who've already lost data that seems closer to willful blindness [1] than merely not appreciating what the risks are.

[1] or lack of capability in some way, though I'd be surprised if that applied to much of my friends list.

If the impact of losing it is small ... yes, that might well make it not worth backing up (or insuring, for a concrete object), but I'm not sure I'd entirely agree that it's then irreplaceable, as I'd understand the word. I think the word has a stronger meaning than “it'd be a bit of a nuisance to lose it”.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

The problem with backing up to hard drives is IME that hard drives are surprisingly fragile, and a random hundred-pound hit for backing up backups is something I think you can justify putting off.

I actually had drive and backup drive fail within a couple of weeks, and whilst my policy is to replace any broken drive with a pair of larger drives, at least one external (and accordingly my table is knee-deep in hard drives), I hadn't got all the copying sorted out. I have enough spare discs and enough spare cash that I haven't yet had to do a bulk delete of old backups, which given the consequences of finger-trouble is not something I'd want to do.

Drive failure has lost me a lot more data (mostly backed up) than finger trouble, though I've had one oh-bugger moment (do not sort list-of-transactions by amount without checking that you've selected all the columns ...) retrieved helpfully from backup. On the other hand, I'm rather slow to give up data as lost; spent two quite long evenings figuring out the on-disc format of NTFS directories to recover my Dungeon Siege saved games!

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I'd entirely agree that it's then irreplaceable, as I'd understand the word. I think the word has a stronger meaning than “it'd be a bit of a nuisance to lose it”.

I was understanding the word to mean "could not be replaced", rather than necessarily implying a value judgement. Is that just a wilfully over-literal reading?

I also wondered whether you counted as "irreplaceable" things which were not exactly replaceable but functionally replaceable. E.g. if my bike was stolen, I wouldn't be able to get the same bike (with my stickers on it, and adjusted to my height, and in fact Raleigh probably no longer make that model) but I would be able to get another bike.

in the case of people who've already lost data that seems closer to willful blindness

Or a decision made based on experience. If you've only lost any data once in 10 years, then you might reasonably believe that the risk of losing data was fairly small, & that while that once-in-a-decade experience was a nuisance, the faff of setting up backups is greater.

e.g. I've only had a bike stolen once in 10 years (living in Oxford and Cambridge throughout that time), so personally I don't feel it's worth spending money on a stronger lock (or time on locking/unlocking multiple locks). Depending on how much of a blow that theft was to different people, they might draw different cost/effort/whatever conclusions from the same stats.

could not be replaced

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Bikes can be replaced with other bikes (within reason, money permitting, etc); your six-year-old's first painting can't be replaced with other six-year-old's paintings. (Literalistically, they can, of course, but that's not what anybody means when they say it.)

Re: could not be replaced

[naath.livejournal.com]

oh shit... when my bike is expensively upgraded I should probably insure it (or risk not being able to afford another one).

Re: could not be replaced

[j4.livejournal.com]

Your first bike can't be replaced with another first bike, though. It was my first proper grown-up bike that got pinched, and it had my Pembroke College sticker on it, and some little stickers that my boyfriend at the time had stuck on it, and I was a bit sentimental about it, but, y'know, if I'd had to lock it up with fifteen locks every night a) it might have still got stolen*, and b) I'd've never used it because it would have been too much hassle. The bikeness of it could be replaced, but the specific that-particular-bike-ness of it couldn't.

* I figure that if somebody wants to nick your bike specifically, they'll manage to do so, and all you really need to do is make it less appealing to an opportunist thief than at least one other bike in the same area.

I'm not sure how you could back up or insure your six-year-old's first painting. I suppose you could scan it... and back up the scan of course... 8-)

I also don't think either of those examples answers the question about whether the word "irreplaceable" necessarily means "of great personal/sentimental value". (OED supports my narrow reading here!) It also doesn't prove that everybody is equally sentimental about their property, or that everybody's risk assessment based on that sentimentality comes to the same conclusion...

e.g. (final example, I promise) my parents have kept pretty much all my & my sister's paintings, scribblings, etc; that's nearly 29 years of carting the damn things from house to house and storing them, but I suspect if they were all destroyed in a fire my parents would not actually be distraught about it, and they certainly wouldn't go to the effort of scanning each one in to ensure that they didn't lose them. I think there are some grey areas between "I would be inconsolable if these things were lost and will take every possible precaution to insure against this eventuality" and "pshaw, worthless, might as well throw them away now". Certainly most of my souvenir-ish things are things that I want to keep because when I happen across them they remind me of something good; if I didn't have them then I'd still have the good memories, but I just can't actually bring myself to throw the physical things away.

To be honest, sometimes I almost wish I could lose all that sort of junk by accident; it'd be upsetting at the time, but I wouldn't have to carry it around with me any more and in fact my life would go on exactly as normal afterwards.

Re: could not be replaced

[lnr]

Yup, I'm absolutely with you on the "couldn't replace, wouldn't be the end of the world or worth going to huge effort for, but I'm not just going to throw it away" stuff.

Re: could not be replaced

[mair_in_grenderich]

what about the stickers on the (j4's) bike? are they replaceable?

you can extract the key features of the thing/why you have it/why you want it and decide whether they are replaceable (I have that because it's pretty - replace with another pretty thing; I have that because my godmother gave me it - not so replaceable).

some things (collections) may be replaceable but a lot of time/hassle/effort to replace. is my time replaceable?

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Backups are hard (1). And as other people are pointing out, life goes on. I'd quite like to backup my photos collection, and recent email is quite important, and there's some historical stuff that I'm quite keen on keeping, but lots and lots of my "data" is of low value.

What I'd really like is a backup solution my parents can use.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Time Machine (http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html) looks like a good idea for "backups for Mum and Dad" though of course I've not seen the implementation.

They seem to have appreciated that the difficulty of backups is not (solely) a technological question ("set it then forget it").

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

I've played with it a little, and it looks quite good, certainly the right level for non critical stuff. Moving files didn't appear to faze it, which was good.

Since the thing is partially a freebie from the Spotlight indexing (it's got to flag stuff for reindexing so you don't need a second process looking for updated file) I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't get hooked into the Spotlight interface a bit more, which would be incredibly useful.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think I ticked that because I expected I'd find in retrospect I'd find I'd lost one or two irreplaceable things, though I don't know what.

[aldabra]

I'm thinking: there're lots of more urgent things I should be doing instead and that'll wait until tomorrow, but now I'm tired and I'll do some sudoku before I get on to the urgent stuff.

I think I've lost all electronic version of my th#sis, but I don't care enough to do an extensive search and anyway it sucked and if I was ever going to do anything with it I ought to start again anyway.