**** on backing up
mhj mentioned backing things up recently, so I'll talk about that.

When I was a young lad, I lived moment to moment, and did not back
things up. occasionally, computers died out from underneath me, but I
always managed to scavenge what I needed from the HDD. Until one day
when I made a huge mistake. "I'll copy all the important things onto
this partition, then wipe the HDD and reinstall." That was not clever,
wiping the very files I wanted to keep.

After that, I did full backups, but they were annoying. I had various
things on multiple external HDD's, and OSX started complaining that
the time machine was full. (I was using a mac at this point. In
hindsight, that was a mistake)

This got me thinking, what's really important? what do I need to have?
movies and tv shows, I wasn't rewatching, and could always get
elsewhere if the mood took me to watch them? no. music? same story.
what did I have that I couldn't just get from elsewhere if I needed
it? Not much, as it turned out.

My photos, that I never really looked at? I guess. not that important
though. My config files? I deleted them anyway from time to time to
prevent them from getting crufty. Not that important either. Old
school work? I don't really refer back to it. It's nice to have, I
guess.

The only really important thing I have, that I don't want to lose, is
about 2 megabytes of text files that I've recorded significant chunks
of my life into. How do I back that up? datestamped tar files on a few
usbs around my house, and encrypted copies on a few servers around the
internet.

Is there a lesson to be learned from this story? Perhaps, it is that
by thinking about what's really important, and not worrying about the
rest, life becomes a lot less worrisome. Or perhaps it's that I'm an
ungrateful fool who externalises the cost of backing up onto others
around the world.