On Perfidy.

I’m going to admit something deeply embarrassing. Until today, I’ve never successfully restored a backup.

In most cases, as far as “data” was concerned, 99.99% of data was work data, and I never kept data on my local work PC that wasn’t either current scratch files, or disposable/redundant. This is my first year self employed, and I’ve started to accumulate “real data” for the first time in my life. I’m 47, folks, and a computer professional, and so that admission is extremely humiliating.

How about you? How do you feel about your own personal practices? More importantly, have you always felt just a little fucked no matter which backup strategy you’ve taken?

For me, today was a bellwether moment. Normally, when my personal PC/mac gets creaky, I buy a new one. And my personal mac has been getting slower and slower every day. Instead of going out and buying a new one, I ran the Apple Disk Utility and discovered that my hard disk was corrupted, and worse, was not repairable using the utility.

So I decided to restore from backup.

I’ve used a couple different backup strategies over the years- at one point I had a monster Seagate backup appliance, which not only fried before I needed a restore, also needed to be rebuilt from scratch three or four times. My current appliance, an Apple Time Machine, has also needed to be rebuilt a couple of times, when my mac refused to connect to it. So, my faith in backups has always been tenuous to nonexistent… I’m kind of a backup atheist.

There are two possibilities when you have a corrupted disk: hardware failure, or software failure. I’ve always assumed the first one, hence my “backup strategy” of OMG panic copying things off to memory sticks, CDs ad nauseam and replacing the hardware. After all, it’s just stuff, and I try to maintain a “people > money > things” attitude toward stuff. That’s not to say I treat my stuff with disdain, it’s just least important on the totem pole. If I lose a couple terabytes of pictures or writings or messages or DNA sequences, and I can’t find a “backup”, it’s not worth sweating over.

Six hours ago, I took a leap that I have never done: I formatted my hard drive, put my mac in recovery mode, and restored from backup. Six hours later, and now my computer is much faster, and reporting no faults. That’s not to say it is “fixed”, or that I fixed it, even though most people, i think, even ones (with or) without anxiety disorders, might just say “job done” and move on.

As an “IT professional”, I’ve had to pay lip service to the daemon “backup” for two decades, an idolatrous practice that was easier to believe was just some sort of magic incantation that happens to work sometimes. I’ve told others, “you need to take backups”, spreading the idolatry while rolling in perfidy. Because I have committed idolatry, perfidy, deceitfulness, I’ve always just accepted data loss like a personal punishment for my “sins”. I suppose, that makes sense in a religious upbringing, but it’s time for me to let that go.

The scary part isn’t deciding that because I have restored a backup, I am newly committed and renewed in my faith in backups: far from it. There’s so many reasons, beyond utterly shitty customer service on the part of most of IT. That includes the fact that all data is ephemeral; no matter the storage medium, there’s a mythos that if you do all the right things, have all the right backups and antivirus software, you’ll be OK. I still think using a backup appliance is much more convenient than paranoia and outright animism, where people believe backups rest on backups rest on backups, turtles all the way down. There’s a finite entropic cost to keeping data that grows exponentially as you grow and mature. But: shit happens.

(There’s a part of me, that wants to blame this on shitty IT. Why my disk can go months with an error without a popup to be seen, yet “buy antivirus protection” pops up incessantly despite the infinitesimal risk of viruses compared to an experienced MTBF of 3 years for IT hardware.) Note to apple: you’re just like all the other kids with the pumped up kicks.

I’ve never been able to successfully integrate either a (slightly less than, healthy side of the border) obsessive-compulsive maintenance routine like my father used to have, nor have I been privileged enough to just throw things away. As a result, I suffer from Hoarder’s disease as well as Hippy Buddhist Letitgoism ambling unconsciously between the two.

I absolutely worship the memory of my father going out every day and wiping the dewy, accumulated moisture from his recently-hand-waxed car to preserve the shine and finish. I adore the sense of conservation where my father would take two squares of toilet paper and fold, refold, and origami fold that paper until he felt clean. I admire people who cut the lawn, and spackle the cracks, and do the dishes and laundry every day.

That’s not how my brain works.

I’m learning to deal with the many ways my brain is thoroughly broken, not because anyone broke me or because I can tell the difference between unbroken and unhealthy. Not because I believe in original brokenness: that’s bullshit. Instead, I’m trying to find a path that accepts entropy without fatalism, and allows me to take an honest look at the things I’m doing and question without judgement, without throwing everyone else around me into chaos because I happen to have a thought.

This is the hard work.