It's Tidy Tuesday, and my main computer is still down.
My home office floor looks like an electronic operating room table. I'm not sure when the motherboard RMA repair process will be finished, and I'm only about 80% sure that the problem will be fixed once it's returned (or replaced) anyway, so it's hard to say when I'll be back to full capacity. Hopefully soon. 🤞
However, I have been grateful for one thing during this ordeal: having my data pretty well organized, synchronized, and backed up has made it a lot easier than it could have been to keep working on the most important stuff.
The biggest help has been the fact that most of my day-to-day work is in some kind of cloud storage: Microsoft OneDrive for the company I work for, and self-hosted Nextcloud for everything else. iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and many other services could have worked as well, functionally speaking.
Having a laptop available and tied into to those same services made it possible to just move over to that other computer and keep right on going. Sure...it's smaller, slower, has fewer monitors, and is generally less efficient and convenient, but it's far better than any other realistic alternative. There are some things I just can't do because of hardware limitations, but they are fortunately rare and hopefully not necessary until things get back to normal.
This isn't just about having backups, although that also provides great peace of mind. It's about not even really needing the data backups because the secondary/alternative hardware (laptop) is almost interchangeable, and the data organization stays intact across platforms.
Apple does a particularly good job with this with iCloud, and Microsoft has made a valiant effort to catch up with OneDrive, though it's not as seamless or complete in my experience. The more technically minded among you can even roll your own solution with Nextcloud or other more granular systems.
All this is to say that some preparation for computer failure--whether hardware or software--is always a good idea. If your main device failed tomorrow--whether that's a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone--do you have any idea what you would do to recover? Would it be a disaster, or merely a hiccup? Would you be terrified of lost data, or confident in your backups?
If you haven't seen it, check out Habits for Backups: Safeguarding Your Digital Life from the Tidy Bytes blog. It's a good start if you aren't confident in whatever data protection plans you have (or don't have) in place.
Until next week, happy data-taming!