048 Creating a Backup Storage System – ProductivityCast

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life? Then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity.

I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and I’m joined here with

Unknown 0:28
Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:29
So much of our lives are lived in the ever flowing river of data that we produce, consume and discard. But what if you lose that data? What if your data gets compromised by some bad actor on the internet? It happens? Do you have a plan in place to backup that data. And that’s the topic of today’s cast. Francis originally generated this topic idea. So I’m going to turn it over to you, Francis to talk a little bit about the background that led you to come up with this topic in the first place.

Francis Wade 0:55
Let me let me go back in time a little bit when I started leading time management programs about 10 years ago, one of the skills that defined was something called storing. And it was really all about people. And what’s happened over time is that it’s of course changed. Because who uses paper anymore? Right? Most of us are using digital information. And the challenge is that many people have not made that transition from storing stuff on paper to storing stuff digitally. So they don’t have the skills of having great backups. So what me battery backup is when a disaster occurs, you are completely protected. So tsunami or a hurricane hits, and there goes your laptop, and your phone and and all of your this gets and hard drive external hard drives? And what do you have to store your contacts, your appointments, all the critical information that you needed all your passwords? Where is all that information? And how can you keep it stored on over regular basis so that you’re completely protected no matter what happens? And recently, I had a of course, a catastrophe. Yeah, I learned the hard way that my

my system that I thought was perfect had a flaw because it was not backing up a particular kind of file, which was that you know, the provided and tell me this information. I found that out after the fact, last a couple days work complained. But I realized that I didn’t have a great system in place. Not as good as I thought I did. In particular, what bothered me was at things like pictures of my great great, great grandparents. So I have some pictures like that. I have the paper picture. And I have the digital picture. But I still haven’t solved the problem of where you store either kind of picture, where do I store a long term legacy file, so that I can win one day? So it till I don’t have great grandkids? But if I had great grandkids, if I think we’re going to have them? Well, how would I show it hold? I keep it for them? How do I keep legacy files so that they last forever? What’s the safe place is obviously not my hard drive or my smartphone. But where is it? So that’s what sort of got the thought going.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:14
Thanks for the background. That’s great. So I wanted to start us off with discussing perhaps the importance of having backups, Francis, you point out several of them, primarily the the idea of catastrophe that destroys a computer or all of your computers. I heard a couple of weeks ago, house exploded, probably from propane, or whatever the gas was that was being used in the house filled up, and the house literally exploded and killed the two the two residents. And that’s just insane to think that that can happen in today’s day and age. But it does hurricanes happen. A colleague of mine had all of his businesses, computer servers swallowed up by an earthquake. And so we all experience catastrophe on on occasion, my office had a building fire, actually, quite recently, to name a few, you know, catastrophes that that have happened to, you know, in my own world, and without those backups, really, that would have been potentially the end of the business, because so much of what a businesses is its data. And so do you do any of you have any thoughts in terms of the any thoughts that you wanted to share with listeners about the importance of of backup data, and then we can kind of go into how we each set up our systems or would would ideally set up a system,

Augusto Pinaud 4:41
I have one word for oldest, and the word is redundant. I mean, it doesn’t matter where they are, but you cannot trust on a one place. So you need to have redundancy of those backups, especially the more important content is the most more redundancy you need. In my particular case, I have a service call code 42. It’s a company who make it on the software is called crush plan, and that goes to their server and eat aside of that, I also have Dropbox for all the other files. And I also have Evernote so and they tend to be replicated. So if one of the three servers fail, or two of the three servers fail, I will still be okay. I also have a local hard drive at home that do backup. So I’m not going to say is completely fail proof. I’m sure there’s ways that hold that can be containing a massive catastrophe that will make that I lose all of that. But in general, I think there is a I have a list chance of this happening to me,

Art Gelwicks 5:56
I run a similar process of one note, one drive Google Drive

Unknown 6:04
local hard drive,

Art Gelwicks 6:05
let’s drives

the redundancy that

a goose oh just mentioned is critical to us. If you don’t have a way to have things in multiple places, because we all know bad things happen. even beyond just bad things though data corruptions, synchronization, there’s, there’s a lot of reason why your information can get out of sync.

I count on those multiple systems. But if it’s something’s really critical, I’ll put it on to a flash drive, and throw that flash drive into firebox. Things like tax return information, scans of critical documents, all of those are on a flash drive, that’s in a firebox right now. So I’ve got stuff every place, which creates its own issues. But I should be able to recover whatever I need.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:04
Yeah, there certainly is something to say for understanding the various types of ways data can be destroyed. For example, art is talking about fire damage, obviously, there’s an opportunity for water damage, if there’s flooding, there’s opportunity for if you are using digital data, most data is written through magnetic means meaning that it’s imprinted through putting ones and zeros and magnetic code on on these on these, you know drive sometimes. And so the goal for you is to figure out and make sure that the data is stored in a place that is is not going to be magnetized, or have a strong magnetic magnetic field that’s going to destroy the data. So you have to really think about these things, high pressure environments, right? You can’t put, you know, if you if you decide to to backup to say DVDs, and you you write your data to DVD, and stick that in an environment that has high pressure, and a little bit of heat. And guess what that DVD is going to warp. And that will be the end of that. So long term storage needs to be thought about it needs to be in a climate controlled environment, you know, preferably off the floor, and, and fireproof. So. So yeah, if you’re going to do physical data storage, that’s, that’s important. I personally believe in thorough backups of all of your data. But you have to start defining what you know, quote, unquote, all your data means. And whether you’re keeping the data you need, or are in control of it all. Many times, you don’t actually hold your data, like your your Gmail, email, if you use that, as a repository for information. Do you really have control over that. And so that means maybe you need to use Google Checkout, which is a an application, Google gives you an order to be able to download your Gmail data and save that as a as a Jason file as the database file, so that you can then back it up. But out, there’s all kinds of data that you may or may not have control over. And I think it’s really important for you to recognize and, and take note of those things, I have a little checklist of all the things that need to be backed up. And I go out there and make sure that I have access to those things. I also feel like a lot of people hoard data. And hoarding data is very similar in my mind, to hoarding in real life, whether it’s psychic, digital or physical clutter, you are likely hoarding some kind of data. And you need to figure out what that is and why it is we want to make sure that we identify whether we’re hoarding some kinds of digital data and and decide how we want to deal with it, obviously, you know, keeping data saving data in backups or otherwise, storage spaces is cheaper today than it ever was. But from a productivity perspective, can it can actually damp and things because that’s more data that needs to be indexed. So that means it takes more time to find everything and more things that you need to sift through if you don’t have an effective search tool. So just be very aware,

Art Gelwicks 10:15
Google is just as much a culprit for this. If you look at their model for Gmail, they don’t want you to delete stuff, they want you to archive it, and then go back and find they’re encouraging the behavior of retaining all the digital flotsam that you have. Now, granted, their desire is to sell you storage space, and build up their search index. But it’s just establishing the fact that digital content has no real weight. So why not keep it? I mean, what’s the harm of, of keeping this stuff, so you can get to it later? Because you don’t need it. I mean,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:57
there’s a there’s a digital divide, this is a, I think, is a real complex that the human mind has to deal with. And the more we have to deal with, it’s not categorical stress, it’s the volume of stressors, right? So I frequently talk about, you know, you have categorical stress, something traumatic happens, that’s a, that’s a stressor that creates distress. And then there is the volume of stress, good stress and bad stress, then compounds and becomes distress in your, in your, in your discussion about Google. I absolutely agree that, you know, Google does, it’s been a long, hard fight for Google to give us a delete option, for example, in Gmail, and now we have one, but they their primary goal is to to amass data, so that they can understand you better, and then make that information more useful to you through search. And they’ve done a fantastic job of that the one of the unintended consequences, though, is that people then feel like they can keep everything in digital. And it’s a it’s a liability. For example, we live in America, you know, with with the litigious society problem, you know, where everybody’s suing each other for things. Well, your email is a big ol, you know, treasure trove for some lawyer someday to subpoena you, for all of that all your emails, it’s a it’s a liability as much as it is a an asset for finding things and I’m, I’m not against saving all of your email, I just think that you should be aware that you probably have bits of data out there, everywhere, that, that you need to start taking some command and control over.

Francis Wade 12:38
I’m sort of of the school of thought that if I have 10 meg of all data that I have from they say 2005, that back in 2005, that 10 meg was a very big deal, because I only had maybe, I don’t know, 200 meg of hard drive space. But today I have, I don’t know how much how many Tara have floating around in the in the cloud and wherever. So that 10 meg is is no longer the concern it was because it’s such a small speck, compared to all the information or all the space that I had the store. So I think it’s not just the detritus and the fact that it exists, but it’s the detritus to overall volume ratio. If I could get really fancy if that detritus is small relative to the amount of other information I have. And if I can somehow ring fence it, if I can somehow place it somewhere where we just stay there, and I don’t have to carry it around on my hard drive. I don’t have to copy it, I don’t have to index route to search it. It’s just there somewhere. If I could ring fence it safely, and leave it there and only go there. If I absolutely have to at some point, then it may not it may not cause me any agita. I don’t feel stressed, I just know that somewhere that email from 2005 is safely stored. It don’t have to do anything about it enough to maintain it. And if I ever need to access if I could, but I don’t have I don’t have, I don’t think that capability exists today, to my knowledge I am, I find myself lugging around files from one laptop to the next to the next to the next. And yes, it’s backed up, whatever they want to do is to offload it somewhere safe, so that it can just occupy some corner of the internet. And I would never go to it unless I need to have it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:29
If this were all physical stuff that you put in a storage unit, and you were paying 200 $300

a month to have this storage unit, would it be a good use of your time, energy and resources to keep that stuff in that space? If it is then good on you. If it’s not, then it’s probably a good idea to look at why you have that information, you know, you’re holding on to that digital information. And the the goal, of course, is to not have to, I mean, it’s kind of like lugging emotional baggage from one relationship to another you are you’re you’re you’re you’ve got all of this history that has positive and negative associations. And maybe it’s useful, maybe it may be useful in the future, in some way, shape, or form. But in my opinion, and having looked at lots and lots of people’s systems over the years, that information is usually useless. And it’s actually holding back your productivity, you’re just keeping stuff for keeping stuff sake. And that’s my only point is that if you’re keeping it for a reason, and it’s not a negative, unhealthy reason, then keep it you know, go for it. But if you’re if you’re just keeping it to keep it, it’s likely going to cause you more, you know, pain and suffering down the road, when you recognize that Oh, there was maybe 1% of that data that was really important that should have been backed up. And the 99% really didn’t matter. But now that the hundred percent has been destroyed, in some catastrophe, you are out of having that 1% of data, you know, and I just wanted to give folks a kind of a common some of the things that I always look at which are photos, which you mentioned, Francis videos, music, documents, and databases. Now databases can be things like one note is art mentioned Evernote as as a booster mentioned, your email, your calendar, if you have a digital calendar system, it has a database of your events, your contacts, I recently had a client have this issue where phone was, I think dropped on the street several hours later, recognizing that the phone is gone, then now a new phone is needed to be gotten Where were the contacts there was no backup was supposedly there was a backup, you know those kinds of things. So it’s a it’s it, you need to be need to have control over those contacts, especially if you don’t know, phone numbers today, as most people don’t, you know, they they live on your phone and you don’t really think about people’s phone numbers. So make sure that you review each of those for how you’re going to back them up, back them up across all the devices with some kind of persistent memory storage.

Francis Wade 17:10
One is that the the analogy between between digital storage and physical storage, I think is is how the problem with it. Because in the digital world, I think I mentioned this, there’s not, there’s not that pull on your psyche that physical objects have in the physical world. So I think the we have an advantage by using digital information. And part of what we can do is take advantage of the fact that it doesn’t have the same bullet physical, physical information, those are paper information. The second is that it takes more time, it can take more time, it could take me more time to go through my emails from 2005. and delete the ones I don’t want than it is just like I said, ringfence it somewhere.

I want to spend the time to go through each of those pieces of information, I just want to lock it away somewhere, somewhere safe, leave it there, have it not bother me, because the time it takes to go through and sort through is just too much sat in my life for my world. And creating what you call digital detritus all the time. But it’s not a problem that I’m doing that. And it’s too much it takes too much time to go through it to bother to go through it. In other words, the investment in time sort of though, is too great. So I prefer just lock it up and just leave it. Does that make sense?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:40
Oh, it makes sense. It just is it shows and I and I appreciate that. Yeah, I come from a completely different kind of perspective, you know, obviously, because I’m, I want to make sure that I’m always cleaning up as I go kind of museum Plus, you know, being a cook or chef. And I don’t want things to stick around that don’t need to stick around. And that’s really quite important to me to be able to be my most effective self. And again, this goes back to our listeners, it’s listening to the various perspectives here on productivity cast, I think is amazing. Because we’re able to come from different places,

Art Gelwicks 19:20
mentally, there’s a big difference between things that need to be stored and things that need to be backed up. So you’ve got multiple copies of the same thing. But if we think about personal and professional productivity, one of the things you can put into your system is a recurring activity, of doing the pruning of this historic tree of information. So you have those idle times, you know, you’re sitting there waiting for an Uber or something else like that, rather than wandering through Instagram or perusing Pinterest, take a few minutes to go through your one drive and kill off some old things and things, you could do that as a recurring rolling activity, which will make your backup process much more efficient. But also it gives you a better sense as to what’s actually in your system.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:18
Amen. Brother art, I’ll sign up for that church.

Art Gelwicks 20:23
Passing the plate or way now.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:26
Yeah, so so I wanted to I wanted to make the point that it’s, it’s fine if your system is different than any of ours, or if you want to, or need to kind of splice things together and kind of make a hybrid of what we’re talking about here today. But the reality is, is that if you feel a difficulty in finding things, it’s likely because you have too many things or the or the tools aren’t good enough. And it may be that you’re stuck in an environment, you know, with a set of tools, where search may not be great. So or the speed of your internet connection might may not be great, or your hardware might not be fast enough. And if that’s the case, and you’re not capable of finding things fast enough, then offloading to a backup system. Different than you know, Krista said redundancy and i and i think i understood what he meant. But But redundancy is different than backup. And so redundancy is a is a duplicate set of the file in synchronization with that with that file. So when you delete that file, like with Dropbox, it deletes the dropbox version. And so backup in my mind is that which that file, which you’re not using, that’s a copy of the of the, you know, the prior files, and is stored somewhere else, so that if something happens to the primary file and its primary location, then you still have the file to us from from that other location from the from the other space that you’ve put it on. And that could be the same hard drive, you know, in some short term backups. And as you go into longer term backups, you can then offload them on to another external hard drive onto cloud storage, or even putting them on to physical, external drives and delivering them to other locations than the one you’re at. Because if your if your home goes up in flames, then you know all the data that was there, if it’s all locally stored, even if it’s backup, backed up to a local external hard drive, that’s going to be destroyed as well. So So think about those things in that way. So my

Francis Wade 22:31
dad passed away three years ago, and it happens, suddenly, there was a space of all come with us. And then he passed. But I had the duty of going through his digital content.

And part of what you’re backing up for always you should be backing up for is what happens if you pass away. And I look at my own system, and I adult that my wife could figure out my patchwork of backups, or, you know, just regular, I don’t know, she knows the password to my computer.

So if anything were to happen, I haven’t backed up for her for me. But we really should be backing up for the next person. Because, right and I, you know, we start it started off by saying that were made to address the principles of backup. And we do so we were talking about examples, but the principles are still but Well, one of the principles needs to be that we need to leave behind almost like a set of 1234 or five instructions for someone who gets into your system and now has to decide for the whole Milan’s of stuff that you have someone who’s written so it was in your head, all the idiosyncrasies that you’ve put in place. And there’s no, I’ve never seen anyone talk about I’ve seen a couple of people talk about the leaving behind a roadmap to get through with the Milan you’re about to leave behind. But they’re certainly not principles that I’ve seen.

Art Gelwicks 24:05
There’s a tool, last pass, that’s password archive, or protector online thing that has an excellent feature that describes just what you’re talking about. It’s an emergency. And long story short, the way it works is, with my account, I have designated my wife’s email to be one of the potential emergency people, what she can do is send a request into last pass through their app, asking for access to my password repository, what happens is I get an email notification that says, hey, she’s asking for this, should she have it or not? Now, in any normal situation, you would expect, okay, notification. Confirmation, she has access. But if there’s a case where I cannot provide that confirmation, I’m incapacitated, or, or worse, I can set a time period so that when she sends that request, and if I don’t act on that, giving her access by X number of days, she will automatically have access. And within that system, I’ve gone through with put all the critical information, not only my password stuff, but account information, access to insurance policies, all of the stuff that’s necessary. And it’s stored in this online archive, it’s a really nice feature that they’ve provided. And it’s something that I think, even if you don’t use that kind of surface, creating something somewhere that the people who would need access to get into your stuff, it’s really critical, because Francis couldn’t hit on a better issue, you’ve got to prepare for everybody else who’s going to deal with this legacy. beyond us, we’re not dealing with banker boxes anymore. We’re dealing with highly encrypted data system, not everybody’s a computer geek.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:18
Yeah, I think this could be an entire episode, having been in estate planning that industry before, back then we didn’t really talk about or even think about passwords for your digital life. But today, they’re actually bespoke products, for people to be able to pass on Facebook account access and other kinds of, of account access for those things. And it doesn’t have to be just, you know, social network and email passwords. It’s you know, your bank accounts are online, and your, your credit, you know, card systems and all of those things that when a loved one passes away, and you need to step in and assist and, and notify people and still, you know, deal with as assets, and people don’t have to pass away by the way, physical or mental incapacity happens all the time. And when someone is even, even short term disabled, then you need to be able to be able to help them. And it’s, it’s a real problem. One, one thing that I will let people know about is that Google has something called a trust account manager. And what this is, is a is a setting inside of your Google account, where you can tell Google to give access to your account, if you have been inactive, all told in the application for some period of time. So you can say it’s, you know, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, what have you. And so I’ve appointed my executor of my estate, to have access to my account, within that timeframe, if I’m not active, and I’m active, obviously, in my email every day, but once I go inactive, because I’ve been injured, or I’ve expired from this planet, then he will get access to it and be able to, you know, step in to my, into my shoes and deal with whatever’s in there. Primarily. I mean, it’s just basically to delete the email account, because there’s no reason for it to be around. Subsequent to my, to my passing. So the the but while if I’m if for some reason I’m like, I go into the hospital, and I’m, I’m there for a while, I want to make sure that my executor has, you know, my my representative has my, the ability to checking the email and dealing with other thing, because I probably get financial statements there, I get everything there, you know what I mean? So, it’s important to have these kinds of access, but maybe we’ll have a whole whole topic on that subject, someday. So I was gonna, I was gonna ask you, Francis, that after, after all of this had happened? Did you? Did you come up with a system for yourself? And what does that system look like today?

Francis Wade 28:53
Yeah, sure, I’ll sure that it’s, it’s, I’m not satisfied with what I have at all. But anyway, the first group of things I thought about was what I mentioned before the legacy stuff, stuff that I would want to pass on to another generation, or stuff that I’d want to keep,

like pictures that I took in the 90s, for example, that I don’t want on my hard drive, necessarily, because it’s taking up space, and I don’t really need it. But I don’t really have anywhere else to put it someplace, I’ve tried to put some of it on my hard drive on GoDaddy, so I use GoDaddy as a service provider. And not not hard drive, but on my server, I guess. So uploaded some files to that server, and keep them just to keep them in a sort of permanent place that that in my mind is where I have my permanent long term stuff. So if I did a video 10 years ago, I don’t need to look at it, and we can have immediate access to it. But I’ve sort of ring fence that over in my GoDaddy sort of account, so to speak. Difficulty is, of course, that there’s no easy way to upload other than through FTP, one file at a time or a few hours at a time. But it still feels very spotty to me. And if I went looking for a legacy fire, like I did recently, couldn’t find it from 10 years ago. And I realized that there’s some holes in the system. So that’s legacy stuff, stuff that’s there permanently, but I don’t want hanging around on my current computer at the moment, the sort of mid term stuff is stuff that’s business related, but I’m not working on. And it probably won’t get to four, maybe in the next month need in the next year to two years. That stuff I backup using, I drive. And I also use peak load. And those are my two cloud service sort of backups. As these guys have said, you guys have said redundancy is the key. I also back up overnight using or once a week using an external hard drive those services also peak load in particular. And I guess peak load is the only one that saves me in the very, very short term. So if I, if I lose a file immediately, Pico does most likely to be the place where I could find it if I’m working on it yesterday on my hard drive crashes. So that’s real short term backup. So they they wouldn’t be caught by my external hard drive. Because that only runs once a week at the moment. I drive may catch it, depending on how frequently it does. It’s backups. But Pico would catch an immediate crash or an immediate corruption. Something that happened in the last half an hour, let’s see. So try to try to put together three strategies for immediate term, midterm and long term or forever term. And, again, I’m not happy with what I have, I feel like I’m just sort of feeling around in the dark rather than using any kind of principles step by step method, which which I would like to because it’s good to get back to the last point, I’d love to point my the executor of my state, for example, to my setup, and say, Okay, here, here’s where the short term stuff, the mid term stuff, and the legacy stuff can be found, I’d love to pass on the schema to someone else. If I were to pass away, I’d love to be able to.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:19
Yeah, so this, this is a good introduction into or transition into what I’m what I’ve done over the years. And I believe that it might be helpful in in kind of the principled way, but also in kind of the the specific tools that I’m using. So I’ve created a Google Docs document, and the Google Doc is shared with my my estate representative. And the goal is to outline what things need to be commanded and controlled. Not, this is not stuff that like is will related, you know, it’s not assets or whatever, but they’re just things that need to be handled, you know, if I still have my dog, or you know, a cat or a fish, you know, you don’t want them to die, because I died at home, probably working. So you,

you I’ve manifested this manual of sorts, and it has all of the instructions that are necessary for being able to manage around these things inclusive in that is a that is are the passwords to my major password managers, and anything that’s not, you know, necessarily important for great security, I’ve put in there. Everything else that’s of high security is actually inside of the last pass account. So I use last pass like art. And so I have all of the really important stuff inside inside there. And the password actually in the Google document is encoded. So only my personal representative would actually know how to kind of decrypt what I what I typed physically in as the password. So I didn’t type the password, literally, I typed up a code that he and I know, in this particular case, my personal representative of my status, my brother, my older brother, since I trust him, and we, you know, we grew up together, we have our own little code, he knows what that password is based on our in person discussion. So that’s just one thing you can think about is a manifesting a system so that people that you trust can decode it once they once they need access. But he has persistent access to that document, so that if anytime I am, for some reason incapacitated, he can step in and help. So I have machines that are Windows, Mac, and Linux. And so I’m going to talk about the Mac and Windows, if people have questions about Linux, feel free to email me. But the idea here is that on the Mac machine, I have time machine backing up to a USB drive. And there’s nothing of consequence on my on the Mac machines. So I don’t predict care about what’s backed up there. But I do it anyway just for good measure. Because, you know, stupid things happen. So I’ve Time Machine backing up two USB drives for each of the each of the Mac books. And then Google backup and sync, which is an application provided by Google Drive that is on each of the computers. And that allows for redundancy, not backup redundancy, and has been gives me remote access to the files that are on the desktop through Google Drive. So if I save something to my downloads folder on one computer, and then walked out of the house, or out of the office, without it, I would, it would be backed up to Google Drive and I would have access to it there. On the windows side, I use something called duplicate, and duplicate he does both the local daily backups, and then a weekly, that’s local. So it’s on the hard drive that is currently sitting on actually I’m sorry, it’s an external drive. So the Windows machines push to push to locally to an external drive using duplicate it. And I’ll put links to all this stuff in the show notes. And then weekly, it then takes it the entire payload of that backup of those drives and pushes them to a cloud storage service. And so I haven’t actually sent to several. So it can push I believe to Dropbox box, one drive, Google Drive, and some and so forth, Amazon cloud drive, and so forth. And so I haven’t sent to several of those. And again, those are, those are weekly backups, so that I’m keeping several weeks of data going back, and then it deletes the oldest one, I think it’s eight weeks. So you know, every eight weeks, the oldest one is dropping off and the newest one is being put on. And that allows for pretty strong backup of my major databases Evernote on on the Windows machine. You know, all of those kinds of things, Mike, my Google Drive is on that machine. Although remember that Google Drive documents are not actually on your native system. So you have to use a different system in order to be able to do that. So I use a software called drive export. So if you go to drive export.com, this converts all of your Google Drive documents like Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, to Microsoft files, so PowerPoint, Excel, and Microsoft Word files, and then saves them to to an external source. So you can actually download all of those using the drive export tool. So that’s what I do. And and then that saved to an external drive, which is then backed up, of course, through duplicate it, as I said to the cloud, if you are a G sweet user, and as I am for business, you can enable Google vault. And you should also look into tools like spin backup, or spanning, which is a Google Apps backup tool. So it allows you to save your cloud storage stuff that’s out there, and a safe place. So you you have the ability to version and to go back to backups. So that’s what I do. I think that it’s important to have the the three stages, right, it’s redundancy, which is giving you immediate access to that data elsewhere. And that’s like Dropbox, right, you have the access across different devices, through that, through that use of creating redundancy, then some kind of short term backup, which is for, oh, gosh, you know, I deleted that thing, or, you know, I had some minor minor catastrophe, but I can restore from that. And then some kind of longer backup, which goes off site, preferably, so that if something catastrophic happens to everything on site, you still have at least some, it’s not going to be fresh data, but it’s at least most of your data that’s going to be awesome site somewhere. And, and so I also do for phone and phones and tablets, both Android and iOS can be backed up using a tool called sync droid. I’ll put I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And so I backup using sync droid, each of the platforms has their own backups to do so. But I actually use that myself, because I like the idea of having a separate backup. Thank you, Francis, for bringing up the topic. This has been really wonderful. And and I and I appreciate that. If you have a question, or a comment about this episode, or something we discussed, you can go ahead and comment on this episode. If you go to the podcast website, productivity cast.net forward slash 051, which is the episode number 051. there at the bottom of the page, you can go ahead and leave a comment or question and one of us will be glad to respond. If you also are there on productivity cast.net forward slash 051, you will find the show notes and I’m sure produced transcript so you can jump to particular sections. And you’ll find all the live clickable links to the things that we discussed here. And there’s also a page where you can learn how to subscribe to the podcast if you’re not a subscriber already. So go ahead and check that all out. Thank you to a gusto Francis and art for joining me here on this cast. Thank you, gentlemen. And if you could, if you happen to be in iTunes and Apple podcasts, Google Play podcast Stitcher, wherever you listen to this, feel free to leave us a rating or review. The positive feedback is just always welcome. And your reviews help us grow our personal productivity listening community. So thank you from all of us here on the productivity cast team for doing that. We’ve reached the end of this episode, but not the end of productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, so join us again here next week. Take care everyone and here’s your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 40:53
And that’s it for this productivity cast. The weekly show about all things productivity with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.