Unfuck Your Habitat

rohise:

Didn’t do any habitat cleaning the last couple of days mostly I’ve been working on rebuilding my computer after having to replace the hard drive.

Even if you’re not in immediate danger of a hard drive meltdown, I think it’s worth spending a 20/10 or two I think, figuring out what you have on your hard drive that is irreplaceable, and making sure you don’t lose it. Pictures and things are irreplaceable, and a lot of us now hardly ever have actually printed on paper photos of precious kids and pets (or our UFYH befores and afters!)

This turns out to be reasonably easy, in a modern cloud based world, a lot of stuff like music and e-books are stored right where I got them from, and replacing those was quite simple. Nevertheless there are a few services that made this a LOT easier (partly because I knew the old hard drive was about to die, and made a point of utilising these services and getting all my data backed up).

Cloud storage is super easy to come by. Google drive is 5Gb free, Wuala is 5Gb to start. Box is I think 5. Dropbox I don’t use, but it’s a few Gb too. Amazon cloud drive is 5 Gb. Microsofts Skydrive is 5Gb, and if you’ve had an account on there a long time like I have, you are grandfathered in 25Gb for free. All of the above pretty much let you buy more space for pennies on the Gb, but even the free space if you add it up is like 30Gb even if you don’t have the Skydrive bonus.

I personally put really important stuff on both Gdrive and Skydrive, because I think the only catastrophe big enough to take out both Google and Microsoft at the same time would probably be a global apocalypse, and I won’t care that I lost my files, because I’ll be busy running away from zombies.

Then I used the others as temporary storage during my little crisis for abunch of stuff that I wouldn’t totally die if I lost, but it saves me a whole lot of time to not have to recreate/replace. Point is, there are TONS of services out there, use them, and be as redundant as you like.

Put your kids and kittens photos on all of them, you might just be glad you did one day. If you don’t trust the services, put your files in encrypted rar or zip files. Both of those formats can be automated into files that are smaller than the file size upload limits, and can self-extract with a password once downloaded.

Password storage is a bonus here too - No I don’t attempt to remember the login credentials to al that lot above (or anything else for that matter :). I use lastpass, because it’s cross platform and has plugins for multiple browsers, so I can boot up any combo of browser on any operating system, and retrieve my logins to most everything fairly easily. The free service is more than adequate for most purposes, and the paid service is pretty cheap (and gets you mobile apps that are pretty awesome). One password gets you everywhere (just be sure to change it frequently).