Don’t Backup your Projects

June 13, 2010 in Web Development - Tags: ,

Quick post to remind everybody to not back anything up. You might lose all your projects and force yourself to reevaluate your priorities, reevaluate your projects and make some important decisions.

Also, rewriting stuff, even though it may seem boring, can actually be great. It forces you to do things better, you do it much quicker than your original work and I think it would help a lot of projects.

So, don’t back up and suffer the consequences when you lose everything.

“What if I *don’t* want to lose all my projects?”

Well, you should use some form of automatic backup to a remote site. Dropbox is great, you should use that. Automatic backup solutions, I can’t recommend, since I don’t have an automatic backup solution. I use dropbox for things that need to be there all the time and for other stuff I back it up manually once in a while.

I’m definitely not the best one to take advice from about backups.

  • http://www.mostlymaths.net Ruben Berenguel

    Every once in a while, all backup systems break for me. And after a few years I’m very frustrated. I lost all my computer programs for the lectures of my master’s thesis… It was a pity. But it wasn’t important, really. All important things are always backed up.

    The consequences are a PITA, usually ;)

    But your posts reminds me of my post “8 reasons for re-inventing the wheel as a programmer”… there are always reasons to go against folks knowledge :)

    Ruben

    • http://arnorhs.com/ arnorhs

      You’re right about that. Most backup systems break at one point – I believe for everybody.

      There are many arguments that can be said for rewriting and, like you said, reinventing the wheel. I’m a big believer in actually *not* reinventing the wheel, but rather reinventing all your own inventions and ideas, because most of the time you can do them better than your original one.

      It’s very hard for programmers to throw away code. Especially if you’ve spent weeks writing it. It can be painful. But usually, when you do things the second time, you do them much better than the first time, so there’s my logic :)