Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Backing up data

Last week there was a spate of fires in Israel which caused thousands to become homeless within minutes. Not surprisingly, the occupational psychologist wanted to discuss backups with me. Apart from data which she copies to a 1TB external hard disk (I have one at home as well), a certain amount of data is constantly backed up and synced at Dropbox. 

My dropbox account is limited to 2GB, which is fine for the OP data and programs along with doctoral material, but as it no longer works with Windows XP (my home computer), I don't use it so much. I have a 50GB account with Mega, which is much more useful (I wrote about it here), but was under the impression that like Dropbox, my Mega account is mirrored on all of my computers. This isn't such a good idea if I have songs stored on one hard drive, photos on another and programs on a third. 

I discovered that I can split the Mega account into two - one part is in permanent synchronisation, mirrored by a directory on my computers, and the other part is stored solely 'in the cloud' with no synchronisation. Thus yesterday I copied a few GB of song files to this new directory and was pleased to see that these files were not copied back to my computer. I'll continue copying files over the next few days - photos and songs - so that if a fire does take out our house and I'm not able to get home to retrieve the external disk, laptop and other gear, the files will still be safe. 

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