home > blog

Digital Treasures: guard them wisely
Posted: July 27, 2010 (03:23) under Backups, Intellectual Property, Security

Buckingham Palace Guard

You’ve probably heard about this “terrific” new Twitter feature called Lists: you can arrange those you follow into groups like “People in Vancouver,” “Family and Friends,” “Colleagues,” “Wise People,” and “Dipsomaniacs.” This is a great thing: for Twitter.

My suggestion is somewhat different: instead of giving Twitter the pageviews when you painstakingly organize a list of people whose streams of thought you find List-worthy, put it on your OWN site, and put that page URL in your Twitter profile. Twitter does not need the pageviews, trust me.

This is an extension of the oft-repeated dictate to Own Your Own Land: put the things that you work on in a space that you control, so that not only do the rewards come directly to you, but nobody can take them away from you by, say, suddenly getting sold to a shadowy oligarch who shuts off that feature or perverts it somehow.

And of course, as always, back it up!

Data Backup Equals Freedom
Posted: July 8, 2010 (11:20) under Backups, Offline Security, Technology

Mercury is the god of communications, rogues, thieves, and social media gurus

Normally, you’d think backing up your data was a safety precaution, akin to flossing your teeth, eating right, and looking both ways before crossing the street. Normally, you’d be right.

But what about when you and your existing site have to part ways? What if your web host goes under, leaving a big hole in the internet where your site used to be? What if you want to move to another server? What if your DNS starts PMSing and your website is MIA?

Your backups can be your guarantee of freedom and mobility.

If you have an up-to-date backup, you can relax. Okay, you can pour yourself a stiff Diet Coke and THEN relax, because you haven’t really lost anything; it’s just temporarily offline, suitcased, and you can put it anywhere you want: new address or old. Once you get your new web home, you can simply upload your old contents and you’re up and running! Try re-creating a lost website from traces left on Google Cache and the Wayback Machine and you’ll never again forget to do your weekly (or more frequent) backups!

And yes, sadly, that is the voice of experience talking. If you’re not the detail-oriented type, you can always have a qualified professional take care of it for you. Now, gee…where would you find one of those?

Related articles by Zemanta

• What is a REAL backup? [Richard Hobbs] (ecademy.com)
• The Irresistable Target: A high profile social media account (backupify.com)
• How to Use Social Media for Crisis Management (socialmediaexaminer.com)

Don’t It Yourself
Posted: April 19, 2010 (12:33) under Backups, Intellectual Property

A simple reminder that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Learn from the mistakes of others; as the wise blogger said, you must learn from their mistakes, as you will never live long enough to make enough of your own. You can even learn from my mistake at Diary-X, where I lost a good, solid 400,000 words of blog; that’s FOUR BOOKS WORTH. Did I trust the guy running the site? You bet I did: Steve was a great guy. Did he back everything up? Of course he did.

And he didn’t.

He’d subcontracted the backups out without really reading the fine print about just what was being backed up. It turned out that he’d been paying to back up the technical specs, not the actual blog contents. When the server went kerflooey, you can guess what happened to the thousands of people blogging there: wailing, and the rending of garments.

Wil Wheaton Backs It Up
Posted: April 7, 2010 (02:01) under Backups, Humor, Uncategorized

Wil Wheaton's recursive tee

Yes, the former Wesley Crusher, current Internet Celebrity Wil Wheaton reminds you to back up. It is not suggested that you back up (as here) an infinite number of times, but if that’s what you’ve got your heart set on, OffsiteDataBackup can hook you up.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Photos from Emerald City Comicon (seattlepi.com)
• Wil Wheaton Will Return to ‘Big Bang Theory’ (tvsquad.com)
• Eureka! (wilwheaton.typepad.com)