Save me

As the digital world advances, so do choices for how to backup all those selfies and videos—and, of course, work and personal files. For the brave and trusting, there’s always the cloud. But for those of us who want to keep things in-house, what’s the best option?

My early career dates back to the Age of Diskette. Specifically, the 8” IBM Displaywriter Diskette, or floppy disk. What innovation! Forget punch cards, this was the wave of the future. I could store 80 kilobytes of documents on a single diskette and, as long as I didn’t bend or crease it, gain access again with a few keystrokes. 

As diskette size shrank to 5-1/4” and then 3.5”, capacity grew to 1.44 megabytes. What would I do with all that space? I made backups of all my files all the time, and soon found myself awash in diskettes. At least these weren’t as fragile as the 8” kind—but they soon were superseded by CDs and then DVDs. With optical media, thin silver discs could store much, much more and do it more reliably.

When computer manufacturers began phasing out floppy disk drives, I said a final goodbye to diskettes and hello to discs, now able to save gigabytes of data. Then the next technology innovation came along. For my one-person office, that took the shape of USB flash drives. Easy to use, small in size, and growing ever larger in capacity.

But wait, there’s more. Last year I began using the cloud, with a twist. Now I’m backing up all my files, photos, and other digital tidbits to a cloud station that sits on my desk. Basically, it’s my own personal cloud, which can take me into terabyte territory if need be.

I expect backup technology to continue leapfrogging ahead, and I will follow along. While computers have become more reliable, I remember too vividly blue-screen-of-death crashes. Fearful of losing hours of work, I learned to save documents frequently, using the shortcut Ctrl+s. The habit is so ingrained, I once found my fingers doing Ctrl+s motions while writing longhand on a legal pad.

I guess I’m just programmed to save. And, because I’m a belt-and-suspenders kind of person, I save in duplicate, with redundant systems, in case one fails.

In the digital world, it's better to be saved than sorry.