None of your data is safe. Ever.

It occurred to me recently that I had never addressed one of the most important and fundamental issues involved in computer use – the implementation of a sensible and secure backup policy.

A lovely 2Tb 'My Book World Edition' NAS server, by Western Digital. If you live in a shared house, you need one of these.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking – “yawn“. However, when (thats when not if) your laptop hard-drive fries itself and you lose your 10,000 word thesis because you haven’t backed it up, don’t come whingeing and crying to me. A quick google search for “I lost my essay” turns up 1.4 million results, and most of them are tales of abject woe and desperation. Any form of data-recording media is vulnerable to catastrophic failure, and the chances of getting your data back once that happens are slim-to-nothing.* In this world of laptops and portable storage it’s not just mechanical failure that’s the problem either – laptops/hard-drives/USB keys can very easily get lost, dropped, or stolen.

Nowadays data storage densities are so ridiculously cheap that you really have no excuse for not making adequate backups. Plus, the availability of Cloud-based storage services like Dropbox  and Google Docs can also make life easier. A truly ultra-secure backup system usually involves three copies of all your important data – one ‘working’ copy (say, on your laptop hard drive), a primary backup (say, an external USB hard drive) and a secondary backup in a separate location (another external hard drive which you keep at your friend’s house). This way, if one drive fails you always have two backups, and even in the worst possible scenario of your house burning down (destroying your laptop and primary backup) you still have your secondary backup.

This might be over-kill for the purposes of most students though. If I were still an impecunious student, living in shared accomodation, the system I would implement would be this:

Psychology and cloud computing – Google Docs, DropBox, iCloud.

My favourite cloud-type - you can't beat a nice bit of cumulonimbus.

Following Apple’s announcement of ‘iCloud‘ last week, I’ve been thinking about how the current trend towards cloud computing might have an impact on psychology students, teaching and research. Not so much about the psychology of cloud storage itself (although I definitely think there’s an interesting discussion to be had there) but more about how as psychologists we can use the cloud to make our lives easier.