Poll: Attitude and behaviors regarding electronic files

[Ernie]

Vote and discuss...

And as always, you can respond to:

11. Other


12. My manner of storage, deleting, and saving, sort of reflects how I handle my physical earthly stuff as well.

[Neto]

My biggest struggle in organization: How to handle files which pertain to more than one of the categories I have set up. I often find that I have the same file stored in multiple locations.

Naming files: Anyone else from the time when you could not have file names of more than 8 characters? Now file names can easily get too long, which often shows up while doing a copy to operation of a deep folder structure.

How do you all typically copy files?
- Drag & Drop? (Which I call Drag & Disappear, or Drag & Loose, because just as I release the mouse button, the cursor slips into a nearby folder, or a sub-directory.)
- Menu based?
(I use a Registry modification which puts Copy to... and Move to ... into the Right click Drop-down list.)

Another thing I find helpful is to designate a set drive letter for a certain external device (flash drive of external HDD) on all of the computers on which I work. (Currently, 5. In my office: XP, Win 7, & OS 10. At my shop, Win 7 & OS 10. A project I haven't gotten to is to install XP Mode on my Win 7 system, and then take it off-line. Lots of web sites no longer work at all in Win 7 - this is the reason I have an OS 10 computer in my office as well as the XP & Win 7 systems, using OS 10 when I need to do certain types of research or downloads from certain sites.) It would be nice to have a central storage system, with all of them networked, but my shop is not close to my office, which is in our home. I have internet here in the house, but not in my shop.

I keep backups of personal files & photos at my shop and out in our garden shed, and business related backups at home. But it's really difficult to keep up on this. For some working files, the master copy is on a flash drive, for others, on a certain computer.

[steve-in-kville]

Some months ago I bought an external drive to back my stuff up. Still haven't moved anything yet. I guess I am waiting for a rainy weekend to do it. I'm bad at that. My work computer went up in smoke a while back and I lost a lot there... nothing too critical but our IT dept. has everything upload to the "cloud" now. Not sure I'm okay with that, but whatever

[Ernie]

I once worked for an organization in which the IT backed up/synced to a separate drive. Then one day something started deleting files and it affected both the main computer but also deleted on the separate drive.

I've always been amazed at how much IT personnel trust their equipment and cloud backups. My experience has been, "Never trust a single back up device somewhere, but have at least two, with at least one not being in the same building."

[RZehr]

Work uses cloud backup and I don’t know what else. Personally I have an external hard drive. A couple years ago, after a few drops, I lost my external hard drive backup. I sent it to two different recovery services, neither could do a thing. Fortunately, I had almost all of the data on a PC, so I got another sturdier external hard drive. I’m going to get another one, in order to have two backups.

[Neto]

I once worked for an organization in which the IT backed up/synced to a separate drive. Then one day something started deleting files and it affected both the main computer but also deleted on the separate drive.

I've always been amazed at how much IT personnel trust their equipment and cloud backups. My experience has been, "Never trust a single back up device somewhere, but have at least two, with at least one not being in the same building."

One of my major data losses was similar to what you describe. I needed to do a "military grade" wipe on a HDD, and designated the drive to be wiped. (I do not recall now why I needed to do this, or for whom it was.) It is a very long process for this kind of secure wipe. (It basically removes the partitions, then reformats the drive, and then writes the entire drive with text files consisting of nothing but ones and zeros. Then it removes the partitions a second time, so that it cam be reused.)

So I started the process, and then left the shop. I came back later when it should have completed the job, to check on its progress. To my surprise, it was still running - it had started the same process on another HDD that I had failed to disconnect before starting the program. I ran a recovery program (several, actually) on the HDD that I hadn't intended to have cleared, and all there was were those hundreds of text files - filled with ones and zeroes. I lost everything that was on that HDD.

[steve-in-kville]

When I worked in construction, it was common for business's to have a concrete vault next to their building that housed whatever computer back-up system was used at the time. I don't think anyone does that anymore.

[joshuabgood]

I am a cloud guy, specifically Google. I figure a billion dollar company is probably more secure than any local servers. But even if I lost everything I wouldn't have lost that much.

[Josh]

I am a cloud guy, specifically Google. I figure a billion dollar company is probably more secure than any local servers. But even if I lost everything I wouldn't have lost that much.

Well. Except they have zero duty to you to preserve your files, and if they don’t like your political or theological opinions, they can cancel your accounts with no recourse.

[Ken]

I am a cloud guy, specifically Google. I figure a billion dollar company is probably more secure than any local servers. But even if I lost everything I wouldn't have lost that much.

Well. Except they have zero duty to you to preserve your files, and if they don’t like your political or theological opinions, they can cancel your accounts with no recourse.

Most institutions that use Google services have institutional accounts with Google in which they pay Google a LOT of money for institutional Gmail and Google Drive (cloud) services. These are contracts and not something that Google can turn off or on based on politics or religion.

I actually have 3 separate Google accounts, my personal one, and separate work accounts for the two different school districts that I work for that have separate Gmail and Google Drive accounts linked to them. I don't know how much money they pay Google, but it is a LOT.

I have seen days when Google services have been down for short periods of time making it impossible to access institutional email accounts and institutional cloud drive accounts. But I have never seen a Google failure that resulted in the permanent loss of Google cloud files. Perhaps they have occurred but they don't make the news.

For my personal files I don't use Google I use Dropbox and keep every file on my computers synced to Dropbox. I have two computers and my wife has another so that means our important financial files and photo archives are all synced to three separate hard drives plus the cloud. I used to back them all up to external hard drives as well but I haven't bothered to do that in a long time. Having everything in 4 different places seems like plenty.

For my work files I use Google Drive which is synced to my personal laptop and my desktop at work. That means every work document I ever create or use is always available three separate places, both my work and home laptop and on Google Drive.

For me to lose a personal file or work file it would mean the simultaneous loss of multiple personal computers plus a catastrophic failure of one of the giant cloud services. That seems like an extremely unlikely event to have happen all at the same time.

Edit: I looked it up. Google charges educational institutions $4 per month per user (student and staff). The larger district I work for has 23,564 students and probably over 2,000 staff (probably more if you include all the subs, maintenance workers, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, etc. who all have work email accounts). So call it 26,000 google accounts. At $4 per month per account they are paying Google $104,000 per month or over $1.2 million per year for all cloud services. And yes, Google has a very real contractual obligation to preserve all of those files. That is part of what the district is paying for with its $1.2 million/year. Things like institutional email accounts are discoverable in lawsuits and have to be legally preserved.

Corporate clients pay even more than educational institutions. I think corporate rates for Google services start at $6 per user.