In 2008, our town was hit with a 100 year flood. We lost all our paper files.

At that time I became interested in digital files as well as carrying them all with me on a flashdrive at all times...you just never know...

Last week, that same town (although I recently moved to another state) was hit with another flood nearly as bad...reminded me of my unfinished data backup plans.

I've been working on transferring our family over to being as paperless as possible. In everyday life, it's been amazing. Able to pull up necessary documents at a moments notice...no need to keep those paper receipts...

But I am always working on improving my system.

We're an Apple family...we all have MacBooks and iEverything. We recently bought a Time Capsule...wireless auto backup. I also use several cloud based services..iCloud, Dropbox, Evernote, Backblaze, Drive.

I love having all my data accessible on all my devices, synced through iCloud, but I am paranoid about data loss. What if there is a catastrophic cloud failure?

And let's face it, living in SoCal, the "big one" could hit an any time.

Our developing bug out plan involves packing the Time Capsule (possibly in a padded Pelican Case) as we grab and go, but I am also looking at ways to have the same information on rugged external hard drives as well as flash drives.

The intention is to keep the flashdrives (rugged) on us at all times, and have the others as part of the (OCDish) redundancy plan.

And this back up...I have to automate it as much as possible. Time Capsule is amazing...now to get the redundant backups almost as automatic.

There is a Mac app called Hazel...an automation tool.

Before Mac OS automatically synced local data to the cloud, I was using Hazel to accomplish some of that...still am with Dropbox. I set it to watch a documents folder, and when any changes were noted, Hazel would sync with all the folders I designated.

I am hoping with automation tools like this, a couple of USB hubs and a schedule for the flash drive backups, I can get some piece of mind that I have done all I can to ensure my data will survive most events.
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Ors, MAE, MT-BC
Memento mori
Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat (They all wound, the last kills)