A Cautionary Tale

Less than two weeks before my comprehensive examinations, my computer died. Those of you without PhD’s may not know what comps are. Let me tell you about that special brand of misery:

After you’ve taken classes but before you’re allowed to embark on your dissertation, you have to take an exam that covers, well, everything. That exam is usually called “comps” or “quals” for short, because “exam that will make you regret all the decisions you’ve made in your life leading to this event” is too long to use in a sentence. Every school and every program has a unique, special brand of comps hell. In my own program, this took the form of a 72 hour, 4 question, open book extravaganza of unpleasantness. Seriously, academic programs should not actively encourage not bathing (takes too long) or sleeping (ditto) for extended periods of time. It’s gross.

Point is, comps were a crucial stepping stone. I had to pass them, or else be done with my PhD program with zero to show for it. And as I mentioned, less than two weeks before, I saw the mac screen of death. It’s akin to the blue screen of death on a PC and the red circle of death on an Xbox. It was exactly what I did not want to see right before the most important exam of my life.

Since comps, in my case, were open book, I had spent the previous months getting resources ready. I had made extensive annotated bibliographies in PDF format for quick search. I had put together bookmarks and other shortcuts. But I had failed to do the one thing that counts: backup regularly. I did have backups – I wasn’t completely irresponsible – but this is before auto-backups were a common thing. I had CDs, but they stopped about three weeks before the screen of death. Considering the feverish work I’d been doing for those weeks, this meant more lost materials than I could possibly re-assemble in the time before my comps.

This story has a happy ending: I worked my butt off, got my materials more-or-less in shape, and did pass my comps. I even showered during the 72 hours. Didn’t sleep much, though.

Now that we’re firmly in the land of TMI, I finally get to the point: back everything up. Always. No excuses. No exceptions. If you don’t, I guarantee you will have a horrifying moment at some point. If you’re lucky, it will be a crucial work document that prevents you from getting a raise or something. If you’re not, it will be a picture of your child that is lost forever.

Since my epic scream of comps agony (I think the entire eastern seaboard heard it) I have been serious about backing up. I’ve done all the trial and error so you don’t have to. Below are some of my recommendations to get it all backed up once and for all.

A great place to start is the old back up hard drive. Macs have time machine to make real-time backup painless. I’m pretty sure there are equivalents for PCs. I will caution you, however: a backup hard drive is not a guarantee. For one, if it’s sitting right next to your computer, as mine does, it could be damaged or stolen right along with your computer. Furthermore, I’ve had more than a half dozen of these suckers fail on me. So this is only the first step, not the only step.

Cloud backup is the real lifeline. In fact, it’s more than that these days. Since my stuff is all in the cloud as well as on my computer, I don’t have to keep anything locally on my iPad, for instance. Whenever I need a document, I just download it from the cloud, do whatever I need to do, and re-upload it. Of course, there are a million tools for cloud storage. So let’s go over a few.

Dropbox is the granddaddy of them all. Everyone uses it. Every platform has a dropbox app. I use it too, but only at the free level. It’s where I keep documents and files that I need shared. So if it’s on my website, it’s stored on dropbox. If it’s a project I’m working on with someone else, it’s on dropbox. But dropbox has one downside I can’t handle: you need to put everything in a dropbox folder. I’m much too much of a neat freak to be OK with that. My computer is organized in exactly the way I want, and no app is gonna be the boss of me!

Enter: sugarsync. It has apps for every major platform, and is pretty competitive in terms of pricing. The real killer feature, though, is that you can designate a folder to be backed up without moving it. Just click: “back this up to sugarsync” and it’s done. Your hard-won organization isn’t ruined in the process. This is my real backup option. Everything but music, photos and videos is backed up here. It’s not the best for sharing, but that’s fine: that’s what dropbox is for.

In terms of photos and video, I’ve tried it all. Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, you name it. In fact, I still have pics on pretty much all of these platforms. But it’s not what I depend on. I depend on Picturelife. First, the downside: it’s expensive. Seven bucks a month. But then again, for me it’s meant complete peace of mind for the most important stuff I have: pics and videos of my kid. Picturelife automatically updates from everywhere: smartphone camera, iPhoto, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, etc. It then brings all these pics together. That’s it. In other words, I don’t have to remember to do anything. ALL the pics/videos I take are automatically backed up. Plus, the software is gorgeous and has mobile versions. Try it for free, see if you like it.

You really don’t need to spend any money on backup options if you don’t want to. All cloud services have a free level somewhere in the 2-5 gig range. If you’re cheap (sorry, I mean frugal), you can simply spread your data to multiple services. Personally I find paying for sugarsync and picturelife worth the peace of mind, especially considering the mounds of data I have. Wither way you approach the problem, do yourself a favor and backup. You don’t want a pathetic story like mine.