On backups.

The whole point is you never put all your eggs in any one basket. So, if a company like Everpix goes down you shouldn’t lose your photos because that should not have been the only copy of your photos, right? You should have your photos in multiple places and if all those places can be like fire-and-forget, all my photos are saved forever like you have them all on your computer, your computer is backed up with like Crashplan or BackBlaze or something like that, or it’s backed up to a Transporter in your house and that Transporter syncs with a Transporter in your office like many many layers of backup. And all those you want to be as brain-dead simple, don’t have to think about it, everything gets backed up automatically as you want, and if any one of them goes down, the hard drive dies, or your Mac dies, you should be able to get your stuff back from, like, your Time Machine backup. If your house burns down you should be able to get your stuff back from your cloud backup. If your house burns down and your hard drive dies you should be able to at least get your family photos back from Everpix or whatever other online service you’re using to just store your photos. You need to have multiple layers and if any one of those layers goes out of business, burns down, breaks, you replace it. Replace Everpix with another service that does the same thing. Replace your online backup with another backup thing. Replace your house with a new house. Replace your Mac with a new Mac that works. Replace your broken hard drive. That’s the whole point of backups. It’s not that all these things are going to be around forever. It’s acknowledging that every one of these things that you’re backing up for will eventually not be around. Either the company will go out of business or the hardware will die. You should be able to replace it because that shouldn’t be the only place that you have your stuff.

John Siracusa, ATP episode 38