Life Lesson from Travel #7 Always Backup Your Data...and Often

This next lesson is pretty straightforward, and as a student IT technician, I should have known better. Backing up your data is crucial. If you do not know anything about technology, do not worry. Google, the provider I recommend, is easy to use and has great tech support. I'll tell you more about Google Drive soon. But let me share my story first.

My US Road Trip was a wild trip. It is safe to say I took more photos on this trip than I have in the rest of my life. I had no idea how to pick and choose what I took pictures of and what I recorded for my YouTube videos. As a result, I had almost a terabyte of data from the trip. This is the equivalent of 1,099,511,627,776 letters in a document, a 157,073,089,682 word essay, 1,500 CDs, 500 hours of videos, 250 movies, or 650 episodes of your favorite TV show! Needless to say, I had a lot to lose if something went wrong.

Fortunately, I was not robbed on this trip, but I did learn this painful lesson in another way. Many people do not know that when you save and delete things from your computer, you are accessing your hard drive. This is where all your data is stored. The more you use it the quicker it dies. Every time you save a file, move a file or delete a file you use the hard drive. Thus, after three years of use at school and 80 days of moving lots of data, my precious MacBook began to die.

As I shared my experiences through weekly YouTube videos, which depicted each of my days in detail, I began to have trouble accessing my files. I would click on them and the computer would tell me, “Sorry, these files are not readable.” I panicked! This could mean one of two things: either the files were truly corrupt and non-recoverable; or if I was lucky, the data was fine, but the computer was struggling to read the files because of missing pieces of data.

To make a long story short, my university IT office used their expertise to recover 95% of my data. I am not experienced or knowledgeable enough to explain how these methods worked in detail, so I will not try. I can tell you they used a system that basically filled in the missing holes of data within the hard drive based on complicated math. This process took about three weeks, but it was worth it. At that point, what mattered to me was that I got all my data back so I could share my experiences with you. But this is not the end of the story.

After my data was recovered, I was introduced to Google’s version of the cloud. You might be aware of iCloud or the Apple Cloud, but I think Google Drive is far better and this is why: ease of use, rapid customer service, and incredible pricing. Google Drive allows you to store everything from word documents and photos to videos and movies, all on their hard drives (which are much less likely to fail you than a computer); you can then access any of your files no matter where you are. Of course, you must be connected to the Internet.

Let me explain each of the benefits I listed above with a story about my data. The first thing I did after recovering all my data was to upload it to Google Drive. Fortunately, as a student at the University of Maryland, I was entitled to unlimited Google storage. If you are or were a student at a university, I highly suggest you look into whether you have this benefit. If, however, you do not, Google Drive still allows you a certain amount of free storage, which is more than sufficient for most people. After that, additional storage is not too expensive. Also, you are allowed limitless storage of high-resolution photos, which is the primary reason most people need large amounts of storage space.

After uploading all of my data to Google Drive, I began to make my weekly videos. As I was cleaning out old data (which I should not have been doing since I had unlimited storage), I accidently deleted folders and emptied my trash, which contained a large amount of my US Road Trip data. Usually, deleting things is not a problem because you can go into the trash and pull them back out. The mistake I made was empting the trash because that permanently deletes everything.

I panicked and called Google right away. They explained to me that emptying your trash on any computer would do just what I feared; there would be no way to recover anything from an empty trash can on a typical personal computer. However, Google explained to me that my situation was different. Because of Google, I was in luck. Since my data was on their server, they still had access to it. They make backups of backups. Within an hour, I had all my photos restored and was given extra storage. My life was saved once again, but this would not be the last time Google was my superhero.

Shortly before I left for my European Train Trip, Google announced they would now offer unlimited storage for photos to all their users. This meant that photos would not contribute to your storage maximum and you could upload as many high-resolution photos as you wanted. You would simply download the app, choose an upload preference, and then start taking pictures. Any picture was taken on your phone, iPad, or another device would now be connected to Google's servers, and you would no longer need to store them on your device. This would free up space and save your data if it was lost on your phone or computer.

As you know, this is exactly what happened to me. When my stuff was stolen, they got both my phone and my computer. I had been saving all my photos on my computer (and not backing up to the cloud because of weak internet connections), and when it was stolen, I was left with nothing, or so I thought. Weeks after coming home, I remembered that I had activated Google Photos and I found over 900 of my photos from the trip. I have no idea how many I took, but it sure looked like most it was there. Once again, I was saved by Google.

Google never ceases to impress me, and this is why I continually advocate for them of my free will. Do yourself a favor and look into using them for all your data and photos. It is true that when you store your data on Google, they can access it if they choose to, but they do claim to take measures to protect your privacy. You might want to think twice about what exactly you put on there, but if you give it a chance, I'm sure that Google will be your new best friend.