I’ve been meaning to legitimately back up my devices for a while now, but creating a concrete backup plan is a lot of work. My current scheme involves syncing a couple of folders to Google Drive, and that’s about it. I clear space off my phone and computer by moving photos to an SSD and/or Google Photos, but that’s still only 1 copy, so it’s not truly a backup. It leaves much to be desired.

I thought about getting a NAS with some drives. I don’t keep too much data, but I guess if I ever make videos it could pile up. I have money to do this now, and I think my mom could appreciate me setting it up for her as well. This gave me a good beginner’s breakdown; I’m waiting for Black Friday to see if there are any sales. Ths DS 923+ seems a bit overkill, but it’s a recommended model and if I have the space, I’m sure I would feel more free to take longer cat videos.

I was mildly surprised to learn how expensive a cloud copy could be, and that it was easier to just set up a separate NAS at someone else’s house. This means 2 NAS to purchase, an upfront cost that hurts a little. But if I failed to do so and the house burned down, I would be kicking myself for it. It’s not like I have many terabytes of data, anyway. So AWS Glacier could do just fine for now? Maybe.

I should probably also back up my password manager locally… It’s so much work. Following the 3-2-1 rule has been on my mind for at least a year, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Also, I’ve been watching Prof Robert Reich’s course (Wealth and Poverty) on YouTube. Pretty cool! I don’t know how far I’ll get (Just on the second lecture, and I watched the first one on Halloween while waiting for kids to come by for candy). Some learning is better than none, though.

Something that stuck out for me: We want to support small and local businesses, but we buy the cheapest price and from online shops. One reason why is that there isn’t enough collective action that buying local would make a difference. Then Prof Reich pointed out that laws were a way to enforce collective action. I think about how his graphs will look like on a global scale rather than just America, though. Maybe the picture is a little bit prettier.

Earlier, I was searching about IPFS, decentralization, and privacy. That is, if a copy of all your documents are stored everywhere, how can you delete it? In a centralized space, sure you need to trust your provider, but it is relatively easy to remove single storage copies. I would hate for teens to have all their online activity memorialized forever. I guess my search terms weren’t specific enough, because I got a lot of results about wanting to decentralize societies. It feels a bit anti-progress.