Online Accounts 2025: First Steps (Premium)

Almost exactly 20 years ago, I approached my wife with a request. I needed to spend about $2000 on two 1 TB LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme external hard drives so that we could back up all our personal and work-related data, replicate it, and keep one of the two disks at my parent's house nearby. 1 TB was an astronomical amount of storage at that time, and each unit had two physical disks for replication purposes, explaining the cost. And since this was a FireWire 800-based drive, a high-performance oddity of sorts, I also needed to get a FireWire 800 interface card for my Windows Server. But I came to her with data to support this need, and I had a plan. I would perform a full backup once each month and then swap out the drive with the one at my parent's house, making another backup when I got the other disk back.

I needn't have bothered. Within a few seconds of my spiel, my wife interrupted and said, we obviously need this, just buy it. And so I did. And for the next several years of that pre-cloud era, I did exactly what I said I was going to, I routinely backed up our data, swapping those big metal drives with their replicated contents between the two locations. That's what we did back then. We backed up our data.

Well, that's what we did after we had experienced some traumatic data loss, at least. As I first observed around this time, we tend to get religion only after something bad happens. It's the visceral reaction to what was once theory but is now reality that provides the impetus for doing the right thing. And in this case, a hardware failure with a data drive was the trigger.

"Not that I needed the recent failure of my 30 GB data drive to remind me, but when you begin storing all of your digital photos, music, and videos on the PC, it's more important than ever to back up regularly," I wrote at the time. "I recommend a strict schedule, and if you use some sort of calendaring program such as Outlook, MSN Calendar, or Act, then be sure to set reminders so that you are prompted to make backups every week or so. While it's possible to use the built-in backup in Windows, it might be better to back up to removable media such as CD or DVD. And make two copies, bringing one off-site if possible. Remember: You can never back up too much."

My backup strategies changed in time, of course, as technology changed. By 2013, I was writing about what I called "zero data," an effort to reduce my reliance on local storage and move as much of my data as possible to the cloud. This was early days for this sort of thing--I'm surprised I was calling it "the cloud" at the time, and it of course received pushback from an audience, then as now, stuck in traditional ways of doing things. Some "have misinterpreted this to mean that I will be ceding control of my content to cloud providers that may or may not have my best interests at heart," I wrote at the time, a line that has obvious parallels to today. "More to the point, it’s important to have...