Devastated

I felt a great disturbance in my backup; as if dozens of files suddenly cried out and then grew silent. Today I learned, yet again, a harsh truth about being paranoid against data loss. Dozens of files I've saved in my arch folder are only partial shadows of themselves or deleted entirely; truncated to zero bytes. Mostly JPEG images and all sorts of movie types: FLV, WMV, AVI, etc. I knew there was text file and FLV corruption, but had no idea how far it reached.

I bought a ReadyNAS to secure my data and setup a naive "sync" backup consisting of two tasks: download files from a FTP site and then upload missing files in reverse. Essentially I wanted to merge my local and remote storages. I thought the program would be safe enough to perform only atomic file changes, as S3 does. I thought the program would be smart enough to only download or upload what was missing. If it had to do everything, every time, then at least it wouldn't damage anything -- just waste bandwidth. Oh, I was so wrong, and dumb.

Previously I've done everything from copy files to source control (VSS, SVN) and burn them to CD/DVD's. Yet in the past year and more I neglected to do either, trusting myself to keep a machine copy in case of catastrophe on the ReadyNAS. Fine and dandy, but I bought a new machine, formatted and gave away the old one(s), and never bothered to copy my entire arch folder. I never burned a physical disc. I may as well have thrown away the key.

Every day that automatic job ran, it ate more and more data. Hungering and ruthless, it has gnashed on multitudes of nibbles, torn through countless bytes, and wreaked havoc on oceans of words. Blog posts lay barren of brightness beyond letters, imagery curtained off for good. What a fool I have been. So long since I suffered such a cruel fate at my own hand, that I forgot the sting of its slap.

Take it from me, and I tell myself here too: copy everything you wish to keep to more than one place. Computers and the internet make this cheap and easy. Put pictures on Facebook, Picasa, and FTP. Put movies on YouTube and FTP. And don't trust to automated solutions, especially when you hack them together yourself.