Back it up off site! Because you should!
What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the UI Buzz podcast. I am your host, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwitham.com. So I'm gonna tell you a little horror story.
Peter:Gonna scare you in this one. Maybe. We'll see. Question is, do you only perform backups locally? Because if you do, you should be scared.
Peter:In fact, I guess the first question, do you make backups at all? Because if you don't, you should be doubly scared. You should be petrified. Now I know I'm pointing out the obvious here, but it's so easy to forget. Right?
Peter:If you make anything at all, whatever it is, there will come a time where you will lose that data, and you need to make sure you have backups. Now, okay, there's several ways you can go here, and hopefully everything I'm about to say you already do, in which case, fantastic. I've wasted a few minutes of my time and a few minutes of your time, and you are good to go. If not, this is crucial. Listen to this, folks.
Peter:You need to have backups, and you need to have off-site backups. Why do you need to do that? Because it happens. Right? Look at the state of the world.
Peter:Look at especially where I am in Toledo Alley. You can lose everything in a heartbeat. I didn't. It hasn't happened, but it might. Right?
Peter:Your property could burn down. The machine could explode. You could lose the machine. It could be stolen. The hard drive could foul.
Peter:Any number of things can mean that you lose your data. And let me be clear. I'm not promoting any particular method here as far as companies or anything like that. Right? This episode is not sponsored.
Peter:But if you want to, folks, reach out to me. But I just need you to back up and back up remotely. So this is so easy to do. Right? First of all, folks having their own in house services, taking old machines, turning them into servers, and backing their data up on that, whatever it may be.
Peter:Right? Your own cloud, your own Git repos hosted locally, all of that stuff, your own home lab, that's fantastic. Keep doing that. That's a lot of fun, And I think it's something that everybody in the development circles should know how to do in case you ever have to try and fix something. And it's just plain out good fun and good use of old hardware.
Peter:However, you need to have that backed up off-site as well, and it needn't necessarily cost you anything. I would say don't go using any of these millions of third party free services that nobody's ever heard of, probably not the best plan. But there are plenty of services out there that we've all heard of, and they have very low cost tiers or free tiers that you should try and take advantage of. Because even just having your files off-site in an encrypted backup in some way is a good plan. Because number one, you can access them anywhere.
Peter:Yes, again, you could have your own home lab that you can access from anywhere. That's fantastic. But have it backed up somewhere else. Now number two, of course, with it being off-site, it does need to be protected. So, again, choose a reputable company or some recommendation from friends or other developers, whatever it may be.
Peter:And also make sure they're encrypted. Right? We're just talking about storing it here. You don't necessarily need to be able to access it to run it. The most classic example, of course, probably for developers, is some kind of git repo service.
Peter:I use GitHub. There's plenty of other good ones as well. Right? Bitbucket is another one that I have used in the past, those kind of things. The advantage there is not only do I have everything backed up and versioned, but it also deploys from there automatically.
Peter:But the point is it's not sitting in the same location as my original source code. Right? Which is crucial here. And like I say, nobody ever wants to think about this, but you never know what's gonna happen. And having it there remotely may save your butt butt one day.
Peter:Right? I can't tell you how many times over the years I've had drives and hardware foul on me. Obviously, it's a lot more stable than it used to be. But back in the day when you used to have to worry about spin up drives and things like that, yeah, I have had those foul. I have had boxes where the power units have gone down and corrupted the drives.
Peter:And all of those kind of horrible things we all have heard probably if you're old enough, the click of death from a hard drive. All these kind of things. External drives, for example, you might say, oh, I got it in an external drive. It's fine. Okay.
Peter:They go wrong too. I was reading a thing the other day, which much to my surprise, I had never thought about, but things like NVMe drives and that, if you don't plug them in after an extremely long period of time, there's the possibility of data loss on those because it's all stored as a charge. Right? It's all in an electrical impulse. And apparently, it can fade over time.
Peter:I didn't know this, so that got me to thinking about it, which got me to where I'm talking to you now. I don't know of anyone where it's happened, but I guess someone figured it out or it has happened. So, you know, spin up drives, put it near a magnet, wave goodbye to your data. Right? It happens.
Peter:Having that remote off-site backup is crucial, especially if it's for a client or someone is charging you you are charging someone, sorry, for services, files, whatever. They may come back to you one day and ask, hey. I need another copy of that file, or it can even be part of your sales pitch. Right? Or the work that I do for you is backed up locally.
Peter:They get a copy, and there's a remote secure copy as well. It can be part of your sales pitch to to maybe win a contract or something, but it is crucial. Hopefully, it'll never matter. Unfortunately, probably one day it will. That's just the way it goes.
Peter:So not too much in this episode, but this is a crucial thing, folks. You really should think about this. You really should have a plan for it. Just automate the way the whole thing and forget about it is my recommendation. Again, keep a local copy of course.
Peter:Yeah. But also have it automated to make a backup off-site somewhere. Just do that. Right? It's very simple to set up.
Peter:Once you've done it, boom. You can forget about it, and you never know the day you might need it. Love to hear your thoughts on this. You can reach out to me, peter widham dot com. Maybe you've got some horror stories.
Peter:If you do, send them to me. And who knows? Maybe for Halloween this year, I'll put all the coding developer horror stories together and make a scary episode. That's it, folks. Have a good one.
Peter:I'll speak to in the next one.
