My friend told me to stop backing up my backups and it actually made sense

I used to keep three copies of everything. One on my laptop, one on an external drive, one in the cloud. Plus archives of old versions going back years. My friend saw me doing this last week and said 'you are just making digital garbage cans, pick one system and trust it.' At first I was mad. But then I realized I had 47 copies of a single spreadsheet from 2018 and I never needed a single one. So I deleted two of the backup locations and kept just the cloud version with version history. It freed up 120GB on my laptop. I still feel a little uneasy about it. Has anyone else ever cut way back on backups and regretted it later?

3 comments

3 Comments

maxl934d ago

Nah dude, you're gonna regret this. The one time you need that old version and it's gone, you'll be kicking yourself.

linda_reed4d ago

Wait, are you saying I might wake up one day desperate for something I purposely deleted like some kind of digital hoarder's nightmare? Oh man, you're probably right. I'm the person who threw out their high school yearbook only to realize 10 years later I wanted to prove I had hair once. Honestly, my whole computer is just a graveyard of old files I'm too scared to touch, so maybe I need this push to actually clean things up instead of clinging to everything. But yeah, my future self is definitely going to curse my name when I can't find that one weird config file from 6 months ago.

theajohnson4d ago

Wonder if @linda_reed ever considered that leaving digital clutter might actually help you find stuff faster than a perfectly clean system?