Group Rationality Diary, July 16-31

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for July 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Immediate past diary: July 1-15

Next diary: August 1-15

Rationality Diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for July 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Immediate past diary: July 1-15

Next diary: August 1-15

Rationality Diaries archive

I did a backup of my computer data to external hard disk.

I knew that computer disks can crash, and once I lost some data after a disk crash, and yet I never before did the full backup. Because... well, it was a trivial inconvenience, something easy to leave to some unspecified day in the future. Also, thinking about a possible crash meant thinking about having to install things again on a new computer, so it was more pleasant to not think about such things. During the last five years I even had an external disk at home with plenty of free space, and yet I never did the backup.

A few days ago my computer had problem starting (then the problem magically disappeared again) and I realized that if I'd lose the data now, I would be really angry that I did not use the opportunity while I had it. Even so, it took me almost a week to really do the backup. Well, today it's finally done.

When was the last time you made a safe copy of your data? If at this moment your disk would stop working , how much would you be willing to pay someone to restore the data? Which of those data would you miss most?

One of the best solutions out there is Crashplan. Unlimited amount of data backed up to the cloud, to your friends computers, and to your other computers for a pretty cheap price.

It continually backs up your data and maintains a version history of all your files.

4Vladimir_Nesov13y

Keeping all your data in version control (preferably checksum-verified, like git, and regularly synched to remote storages) ensures that it'll likely survive at least as long as you do, while not taking away the freedom to incrementally modify/organize it (as would be the case with large archive backups). This encourages you to actually keep the data organized, and to know which data is unique, to be preserved, making it more useful as a result.

1Dorikka13y

I use Carbonite for this, as it claims to keep everything backed up more-or-less real-time without me having to do anything ever. This is only a recommendation wrt ease of use. I have not actually tested whether I can easily retrieve the backup,