Reader,
You might have experienced the loss of data or a few important edits in a document at least a few times in your work. Everyone experiences that.
I don’t know why we tend to forget to either save our work or back up regularly.
The gruelling part is the need to do over the whole effort. So, just saying “back up your work” is not helpful advice. Helpful advice might be something that we can see with an example. When is backup necessary?Anytime you begin working on a long-term and important thing.
If you take 10 days to come up with a 5-pager business document and lose it, you can’t recreate it with the same depth in a day or two.
Think about it. Most of the knowledge work is incremental. For example, no matter what you are creating: a design, software, or a presentation; things take shape over a few days to weeks. Work is incremental. This incremental progress is the biggest reason why need to back up regularly. A picture is worth a thousand wordsLook at this screenshot from one of my software development projects’ archives:
There are 28 copies of this project file backups to date. Each file has a dedicated change log. (The change log details fall under the “version control” discussion. I will cover it in one of the future letters.) File corruption happens all the timeForget that these are MS Access software files. These could be MS Word or Adobe Photoshop files too. And do you know what is common to all computer programs?
File corruption.
Your 2 days of effort go down the drain. Habit formationNo matter how advanced systems we use for automatic backups, for regular knowledge workers, it boils down to their habits.
If we are habituated to not save work, or think of consequences of not making a backup, it is difficult for automated systems to come to our rescue.
Making a regular backup of files after making a major change, should become a habit. Combine it with the 3-2-1 backup strategyIf you remember, almost a year back, we discussed the 3-2-1 backup strategy.It was an overall backup strategy: a total of 3 backup copies, on 2 media types: solid state drives and cloud, and 1 offsite copy.
If we combine it with our today’s discussion, it would serve us as the ultimate solution in maintaining all-important work resources without losing them. I just shared computer-based offline backup practices today. What are your backup practices? Offline or online. Hit Reply and tell me about it. Reads of the week:Link
If you’ve just begun learning to code and read this article, you would give up. Erik is right in his analysis. Look at the graph that he has produced in the article. When you just begin learning to code, the few weeks from your “Hello world!” are more like a hand-holding honeymoon period.
The instructor on your YouTube video/Coursera is aware of it. That’s why they try to soften the blow as much as possible.
But as you read the article fully and digest it, you realize that though it is hard, it is one of the most fulfilling skills to learn as a knowledge worker. DHH is right about everythingLink
I relished this DHH’s 2-hour interview.
Though I have mentioned him multiple times in this letter, if you don’t know, David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and racing driver. He is also the owner and CTO of 37Signals software firm.
One of the YouTube comments on this video said:
“This is not an interview; it’s a monologue, and I’m here for it.”
Another one said: “I just love DHH’s brand of angry enthusiasm.”
If you watch it, you’ll know it was worth 2 hours.
In this interview, DHH talks about the joy of programming, competence, parenting, racing cars, open source, etc.
If you’re not much technical person, you may want to skip the first hour and begin here. |