The Department of Redundancy Department

摘要

This is an article about backups, many kinds of backups. I am backing up my home computer hard drive even as I write this. I have a half-terabyte backup drive, and I drag the folders I want onto it by hand. I have about 300GB of stuff. I recently taught a technology class in which it became clear that while my students knew that backing up their data was a good idea, they really weren't sure how to go about making a backup. They knew that they needed to get an extra hard drive and maybe some software, but that was about it. That equation gets further complicated by the preponderance of both cloud-based backups and the varying policies and procedures of online applications that people may be using. Add to this the extra layer of privacy policies that we have in libraries, and a simple idea becomes a complex process.