A few years back, I let my blog’s domain name expire. And my blog was gone. Ten years of posts; terrible ones in 2006, but over the years, I learned how to write — a little. Learned how to get my ideas out on the page — somewhat. It’s a journey.
And I lost that journey when I lost my blog. BUT! At some point, I’d installed a plugin that e-mailed me copies of my blog database. They went to an e-mail folder I never even looked at. And I hadn’t been blogging for a couple of years, but at some point I’d thought to download all the blog pictures. Just in case.
So, I had those available.
Come 2020, I’m on Twitter, as we called it back then, and a lot of the people I talk with were mentioning “Blapril”, I think it was. April 2020, a month into lockdown, and nobody could leave the house.
Weird that all it took was a global pandemic and utter boredom to get me writing again.
Anyway, I started from scratch on this blog. Eventually, the web developers in the Blaugust group started doing fun things with their blogs, like rewriting their whole blog as static HTML or writing whole content management systems from scratch, and I said, hey, I could do that.
The new WordPress had changed their format since I’d made those old backups I found in my e-mail, but I wrote a Python program to read it all in, change the format, and write it all out again. I stood up a temporary copy of West Karana on an EC2 instance, then took the content I’d made here on Chasing Dings, folded that in, exported it all using the WordPress tools, imported it here, uploaded the images and I WAS BACK IN BUSINESS. All my posts, good or bad, back.
A couple of days ago I was congratulating myself, once again, on having backed up all the WK stuff, when it occurred to me that that backup was all I had. I could lose the Chasing Dings stuff, everything I’d written here since the start of the pandemic. I got my blog to export all its data so I’d have it locally, just as I’d done with West Karana.
But what if my computer suddenly died? I’d lose that backup, and all the other stuff I have on my computer.
I’ve worked in computers for years. I even had a job once where I was making the backups and sending them offsite every day. I was just being lazy about not setting up something here, at home.
So, I bit the bullet and signed up for the paid version of Microsoft’s OneDrive. I looked at a lot of solutions, many not part of some huge megacorp, but this was the one that I trusted most. Google Drive means dealing with Google, who has been known to shut down accounts for no reason. That would lose me my e-mail, all my data, everything. I don’t trust Google.
I don’t trust Amazon for similar reasons. I do use AWS, but I have to, for work, so it makes sense I would use it for hobby stuff as well. But, they could shut me down, and then I lose everything.
So could Microsoft, of course, but I poked around and it doesn’t seem like that’s the kind of thing they do, so… I went with them. I went with the 1 terabyte plan, and that comes with the Office Cloud 365 apps — Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint and Word. I haven’t installed them, yet, but it’s nice to know I can move to them if I like. Outlook would allow me to unload my e-mail from GMail, bringing it locally, and able to be backed up.
I chose for my backup software rclone. It’s widely used, it’s cross-platform, and it is scriptable. It doesn’t come with a UI, but I think some are available. Having it be scriptable was important to me, though. Now I can just run my backup script and everything important on my computer gets sent to the cloud.
Three places — OneDrive, Bluehost (my blog host), and my computer.
Two locations — it’s in three. Two on the cloud, one locally.
At least one offsite — two in the cloud.
My blog is safe.
OR IS IT?
As of … right now, everything is backed up. But tomorrow, it won’t be.
I’m going to need to teach rclone how to look into Bluehost make a backup copy of the blog data and any new media, download that, and then upload that to OneDrive — automatically. (After I wrote this blog post, I went and configured rclone to go get any new media, bring it down to my computer, and then back it up on OneDrive. Now I just need to get a daily backup of the content done.)
So I’m not at the end of the backup journey, but I’m not at the beginning of it, either. I’m somewhere in the middle.
But if my blog suddenly vanished tonight, I’d be able to restore it. Just one more small step, and it’ll be entirely safe — along with all my tax information, other personal documents, pictures of my family and so on.
(Oh yeah, rclone supports encryption, too. That’s important when you don’t want megacorps looking at your tax information, personal documents, and pictures of your family).
Office 365 has a decent web interface in case you ever need to look an an Excel file or something, but don’t want to install Excel. I’ve been using it instead of Google Sheets. For example the web excel is at excel dot cloud dot microsoft.
And y’know what? I have NO backup of dragonchasers so thanks for the prompt. I gotta get a system in place!
It was surprisingly easy once I decided to sit down and just get it done.
Just a note on the trust of Google. At least for Blogger, owned by Google, I’ve not had any issues for the 20 something years I’ve used it. They also let you export all the data so I do make regular copies myself of both text and images. With that said you are correct I could wake up tomorrow and so many things would be different if I didn’t have my Google account.
I lost everything I had with Google Reader, Google Wave, Google Buzz, and Google Plus. I am done trusting Google for anything, especially content related.
Google Plus was why I stopped blogging — G+ was easier and more fun. So that’s years of stuff I posted there instead of here, just gone.
The thing about all of those – or certainly about Reader and Plus but I’m sure it applied to the others too – is that Google gave plenty of notice about their intention to shut them down. I agree they have a history of giving up on stuff but they aren’t going to go bust and vanish overnight. I’m willing to take the chance that, should Google decide to shutter Blogger, something we’ve all been expecting for years, they’ll announce it months ahead of the final shut-down and we’ll have plenty of time to migrate our data.
Google and Microsoft are about as safe as you could hope for, I’d say. I wouldn’t expect any of this stuff to last, even if it’s being provided by a household name – much less if it’s a smaller company or a collective of some kind. Countless household names from my childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and middle-age no longer exist. I don’t imagine most of the well-known tech and internet names will still be around when someone who’s in their twenties gets to be my age.
The older I get, too, the less I worry about losing stuff, be it things I’ve created or thigs I’ve acquired. I do back everything up – I ran Google Take-Out for the blog today – and I keep multiple copies on internal and external drives. I haven’t backed any of it up to the cloud, though, because I figure if I somehow find myself in a situation where the contents of my house no longer exist, I’ll have bigger things to worry about than my old blog posts.
Anyway, I think I’m going to have to do a post on this topic, which seems to be developing some traction, because increasingly I find my views on it have changed. I’m beginning to admit to myself that most of the things I used to imagine I couldn’t do without I probably wouldn’t actually be able to remember without prompting, which makes me question just how much I really needed them after all.
I have the Wave stuff around somewhere, or I did at one time. I had the opportunity to grab the G+ stuff, and didn’t, because I didn’t know what I would do with it.
I just… don’t trust Google. I’m looking forward to reading your post!
I like the history of your earlier recovery: nicely done!
I ‘self-host’ my blog, so my storage sits in my basement. I use the Updraft Plus WordPress plugin to automatically back up the block each day. And I used to have an automatic crontab task that copied those backups onto a separate network attached storage device regularly.
I’m skeptical whether the ‘two location’ part of my solution is functional as I set it up a decade ago and really haven’t looked at it since. And nothing is stored offsite… thanks for that reminder!
That should be ‘back up the blog’, not ‘block’- apparently I haven’t had enough coffee yet this morning
I would like to have a separate backup solution locally, too — in fact it was me being so lazy about getting an external hard drive that led to me never getting around to making backups like I should. It was always going to be, “when I get that external hard drive”. But no more waiting! It’s done now!
I don’t trust Google OR Microsoft with my stuff! I’m not much of a Cloud person in general. If it’s not on several of my own local drives, then I’m not comfy with my backups. XD
That being said, it’s interesting to see how other folks back up their stuff and what systems they use. Backing up is so important!
Yup!