It wasn't. The kitchen was full of pots and pans that look like they'd been bought from an op shop.1 The outside loungers were literally rotting. The 'golf course' was in comically poor form. The BBQ was missing its metal plates -- you know, the bits you cook on -- and a gas bottle. The toilet blocked. And so on.
After leaving my 3-star review, 'Harry' called me multiple times and tried to bribe me, with money, to change my review. (I have a conscience. I declined.)
Hotels
We're in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We booked an 8.3 'very good' hotel on Booking.com. Small, but recently refurbished, and reviews rave that it's the cleanest place and so on.
Two weeks ago, 'Lopez' from the USA, 9/10:
Best hotel slippers I’ve ever worn. Can I buy them? Asking for a friend (me)
'Barnhart' from the USA, 9/10:
A small but beautiful hotel tucked away in the city center. Super clean, friendly service, and unbeatable location.
'Janice' from New Zealand, 9/10:
The hotel was fantastic, with great service and beautiful decor.
(I'll point out that Lopez, Barnhart, and Janice are all suspiciously beautiful young ladies. This is relevant.)
We left after an hour. That is the building. Those photos were taken there at some point. But then I don't know what happened to all those soft furnishings. I don't know why there are photos of a croissant and a burrito.
The luxury you see in those photos is simply not real. I doubt it ever was.
Telegram
I'm on Telegram (for bot notifications rather than anything personal). About once a week I'll get a message from -- would you believe it -- a suspiciously beautiful young lady.
After a brief how'dyoudo?, the offer is made: do you want to make some money by reviewing online hotels? Until today I'd wondered what the scam was. What do they want from me?
Well, the answer is nothing. The scam is the other way round. I think if I say, yes, I'll take $10 to review a hotel, I might actually get the money.
Because all online reviews are now fake. They're purchased. We've known this to be the case for Amazon for years. And now it's accommodation. Gone. Dead. Useless.
Of course, AI will ruin this further and faster.
What now?
Obviously you can still trust the Hyatt. And the larger, older places that are unique to a city. If they were no good, they'd have gone out of business by now.
But if you want somewhere smaller and cheaper, I think you have to see it with your own eyes. That's what we're going to start doing: the first few days in a new city will be somewhere trustworthy but above budget. Then, with guidance from the online booking sites and individual blog posts, we're going to go and walk into places. Can we see the room? Can we make a booking here at the desk, rather than online?
I will never trust an online review again.
Footnotes
That's a thrift store or a charity shop if you're not from Australia. ↩
Well we had to talk about it at some point. This might turn in to a mini-series as well, so let's just see how this intro goes and let me know what you want next.
This is necessarily quite technical in parts.
Brief background
Old versions of my site stated that 'I can fix your email'. And I believed that I could: from 2014—2017 I meticulously filed many thousands of emails as part of my job as Technical Project Controller of a $300m data centre deployment.1 I could find anything, near-instantly. It was wizardry.
And it got us out of contractual holes all the time.
— You said you'd have it done by now.
— No we didn't.
— Slides email from 32.15 across table.
Then two things happened.
I'm talking about work here, because it's the hardest problem. If you can solve it at work, home becomes trivial. We'll get there.
Teams
No, not the fact that you like your colleagues and bond with them as a common unit in service of a greater good. Instead, the antithesis of that: Microsoft Teams.
More broadly, the fact that we're all conditioned to chat now. And what's happened is that we've started to treat email like chat. It used to be that an email would be longer-form and, if you were startlingly fortunate, well-considered. My experience is that these days are gone. My previous last ever boss just hit reply—type—send all day long. Dozens and dozens of one-liners: chats.
You wouldn't dream of trying to organise your Teams, and I think corporate email has effectively merged with chat.
The problem is that useful -- contractually useful -- information still arrives by email. So there's no doubt that organising some of it is a worthwhile endeavour. And the same applies at home. Forum summaries? Meh. My travel insurance policy? Ah yes please.
Outlook became Hotmail
This is very work-specific, but worth mentioning. Outlook used to be a really powerful mail program with amazing features that, properly harnessed, could really help you get on top of your email. See 22.00.0022.
Then they decided that you were a mindless cretin and turned it in to a banal simplification of Hotmail. Now it has essentially no features but, used long enough, it'll lull you to sleep. So, that's good?
Message: don't stress it
The message here is that email should no longer be considered 'solvable'. We can still use sensible strategies to deal with it, but the Platonic ideal simply isn't there. It's best that you accept that now.
Principles
That said, I think we can lay down some principles from which all else follows. I'm typing these off the cuff so they might evolve.
1. Never delete anything
As in, once an email has been received, it should always be accessible in some way. You might equally phrase this as 'always archive everything'.
Because you don't know what you might want later, and if everything is saved, that's one less decision to make. Should I save this one? shouldn't be something you angst over. It's saved. Move on.
2. Only file what's important
I get … let me see … about 100 emails a week. Not that many, thanks to principle 3. Of those, I'd say less than one a week needs to be 'filed': put in a folder with a number so that I can easily find it, without search.
The rest just get 'disappeared' from my inbox. Because they're saved, thanks to principle 1. I'll show you how I do this while not using Gmail.
3. Unsubscribe!
That button works, you know. Smash it! You can't stop spam, but you can stop mailing lists you signed up for.2
In that having only the things you actually need to deal with in your inbox is good for the brain. Why leave all those newsletters and forum summaries there? You wouldn't leave hundreds of files on your Desktop. (Right?…)
I use my Desktop cautiously. I'll drop a file there, briefly, while I decide where it needs to go. If I see a file there, I know it needs to be dealt with. I use my inbox in exactly the same way.
But don't get all religious and lose sleep if you've got half a dozen things in there for a couple of days. It's an inbox. You'll get to them.
Combined with principle 1, this is easy. Get in the habit of reading your mail and, if there's no action, immediately deleting it. The mechanics of this varies depending on your mail program.
I'll show you how I do this with an IMAP account and Apple Mail. It's the default behaviour for Gmail. Your corporate Exchange account is more of a challenge.
Primary objection: I want to use my own domain name. I'm never going to sign up for something using whatever@random.com.
And it feels like an over-optimisation to have to manage an individual address for every service. I tried it (self-managed) for a while and it just caused friction. As we'll see I have one address that I think of as 'the sluice'. I use it to sign up to things. I consider it semi-ephemeral.
I think you need at most two addresses.
The sluice. When you need to sign up for a thing, use this. Eventually you might rotate it out for another.
A professional address. If you're at work, you've already got one. If you run your own thing, get one. If you don't run your own thing, you don't need one.
So which address do my friends and family use?, you ask. A: none of them. Do your friends still email you? Mine don't. It's all messages/group chats.
6. Reduce friction
Should have been number 1. Because all of this is in service of reducing friction. Email is something that, once configured, should take as little of your time as possible.
More email and more addresses and more domains just means more configuration. You don't need it. Email doesn't deserve it. Step away.
Implementation details
So here's how I actually do this.
I like old-fashioned email. I do want to control it myself, and I don't want to use a web service. So I have an SMTP/IMAP/POP3 account at a mail provider: Migadu.
I was with Fastmail, who are great. If you're not an expert at this, you should probably choose them.3 Migadu are cheaper if you manage multiple mailboxes as they charge by the account, not by the mailbox or domain. Per principle 5 I now only have 2 mailboxes, but I also manage a handful for other people. I can do this all very comfortably on Migadu's Mini plan for US$90/year.
This isn't a setting up an IMAP/SMTP account tutorial, so I'll just assume you know how to do that. As always, just ask if you need a hand.
The server duplicates all mail
This is how we conform to principle 1: never delete anything. When mail arrives at our mail server, it's immediately forwarded to another mailbox. On Migadu, this is at [Domain] → [Mailbox] → Forwarding.
I've found this to be massively more reliable than trying to have my mail client make a copy of the email. And what if you delete the email on your phone before your Mac creates the copy? Better for this to happen server-side.
So I've configured email to hello@johnnydecimal.com to forward to archive@johnnydecimal.com. Then my mail client uses POP3 -- still supported at Migadu! -- to pull this mailbox, and I have a rule to immediately move that mail to a local 'Archive' mailbox, and mark it as read.45
Figure 22.00.0122A. macOS Mail.app rule.
The net result is that all mail invisibly lands in the local archive, and I'm free to delete messages from my inbox after I've read them.6 It works great.
Gmail/Hotmail version
Most webmails have the concept of archiving an email vs. deleting it. They're all a bit different, and I don't use any of them, but that's what you're looking for.
Enterprise Outlook version
I think the modern Outlook also has this same concept? The habit you're going to have to build is pressing the keyboard shortcut for 'archive' vs. just hitting the delete key.
If someone can confirm that for me, I'll update this.
Filing important messages
Principle 2 says to file what's important, and I do that in exactly the same way that I do in my file system: with hierarchical Johnny.Decimal folders.
That's it. No secret sauce.
Adding a currently-in-use folder as a 'Favourite' helps with usability. Mail.app handles this nicely: you can favourite a nested folder and it'll appear as a top-level folder in the list. So I currently have 15.53 Jucy's World Tour stuck there as we're about to take a trip.
You might skip area folders
At work, when I had a lot more folders, I found it useful to skip creation of the area-level folders. Go straight to categories. Less clicking, works great.
My sluice address
FYI my sluice address is 2020@joh▒ny.net.au. It gets forwarded to the same archive. You don't need to configure multiple archive targets.
Spam
I did this assuming that the account would eventually be riddled with spam and that I'd eventually cycle up to 2025@ or whatever. That hasn't turned out to be the case: the account gets very little genuine spam, as in Nigerian princes trying to leave me their inheritance.
Spam these days comes from companies who lie to you when they pretend that they won't sign you up to their mailing list. See principle 3.
(Actually I get way more spam to my JD address because they can somehow scrape Shopify stores. I know my site isn't 'ranking on Google for SEO', but no thanks, I don't need your help.)
Sending bulk mail
Just a brief mention, I have a need to send bulk outbound mail because of the forum and my newsletter.
Pros: it's essentially free at my volume. Cons: literally everything else.
Let me know what else you need
That was just a brain-dump. Let me know what else you need.
Footnotes
More accurately, I had rules set up so that the majority of incoming email was filed for me by Outlook. This is no longer possible. ↩
And those you didn't. It really pisses me off that companies ignore the 'please don't sign me up to the mailing list' button. It's a lie the majority of the time. But when you receive that first unsolicited email, it does have an unsubscribe link, and that does work. ↩
They're more geared up for consumer-level support; their console is friendlier; they have built-in features like single-use addresses. ↩
I've named this account ~ as it needs to remain active in Apple Mail, but I want to ignore it in the list of mailboxes. I find the tilde just gets out of the way. ↩
If you're not familiar with POP3, it's an older email protocol. Where the modern protocol, IMAP, assumes that you want to keep messages on the server -- normally a good thing, so you can access them from your phone, Mac, iPad, webmail -- POP, which stands for 'Post Office Protocol', actually downloads the mail from the server, and then deletes it from the server.
In this situation, where we only want this archive on one computer, that's exactly what we want. ↩
The archived copy even has the same message ID. So you can link the version in your inbox to, say, a to-do, then delete that copy and the to-do will link to the version that remains in your archive. ↩
In the previous post, we left off by documenting our synchronisation strategy. You should have a clear picture of exactly where all of your data is and, crucially, what's a full vs. a partial copy.
Synchronisation is not a backup
Looking at your diagram, I bet you're pretty pleased with yourself. Look at all those copies of your data! How lovely to have so many backups.
But say you (accidentally, without noticing) delete a file from this laptop. The deletion is dutifully synchronised: that is, the file is deleted everywhere.
Or you edit a document and realise that you've made a mistake. You can't go and fetch the old version from anywhere, because your mistake has been synchronised.
So it's great that you have these multiple copies, and in some situations they can help you recover data. If you drop your laptop in the ocean, the synchronised files in the cloud don't become water-logged. You can get a new laptop, install Dropbox, and off you go.
Don't let this lull you in to a false sense of security. Without backups, you could easily lose everything.
What makes a backup?
Backups are just copies of your data, but they have special properties. This is why you need dedicated backup software to manage this for you.
1. You can roll back in time
In the scenario where you've made a bad edit to a document, you might not realise for a while. In that time, you've made more edits that you want to keep.
Figure 22.00.0120A. Whoops.
So you need to be able to go back in time, restoring versions of the document from further and further back until you find the pre-bad-edit version.1
Figure 22.00.0120B. Restoring an older version of a file.
Apple nailed this metaphor with the backup software it built into macOS in 2007: Time Machine. The Eclectic Light Company has a brief history here, from which I've gratefully borrowed this (old, cheesy) screenshot.
Courtesy of The Eclectic Light Company; link above
Backup software typically keeps what are called 'staggered' backups. So you'll have a copy every day for the last 30 days; then a copy every week for the last 52 weeks; then a copy every month for the last 60 months.2
This allows you to go far back in time without needing to store a massive amount of data.
2. They're immutable
Which is just a fancy computer-science term meaning they can't be changed. Once you've backed up a file, that copy of the file, which represents how it was at that instant in time, is locked, forever.
This can help you restore from scenarios where a hacker has encrypted your files and is demanding a ransom to decrypt them. If your files have been nefariously encrypted and you're relying on synchronisation, guess what was also synchronised? The encryption!
But if you have an immutable copy of your files, you can roll-back to a pre-hacked copy. You might still lose some data, but it won't be a catastrophe.
Backing up
Sufficiently scolded, now we turn to the mechanics of backing up your data. Backup software is just software, so it needs to run somewhere. That'd be your laptop -- you can't run software at Dropbox -- so let's add that to the diagram.
Some new shapes
Before we do, let's quickly review our diagram key. I've chosen the colours very deliberately, and there are a few new block types.
Figure 22.00.0120C. Our updated key.
Green blocks represent a full copy of our data. Orange blocks represent partial or secondary copies. And the new blue block represents a backup of our data. Solid lines are backup jobs, dotted lines are synchronisation.
The ideal case
In the ideal case, all of your data is on your laptop. So you're backing up a full copy of your data.
If your diagram shows a blue backup block coming from a green primary data block, you can sleep easy.
Figure 22.00.0120D. Backing up the ideal case.
Are you backing up everything?
We've seen that I can't afford to keep all of my data on my laptop. More realistically, this is the scenario.
Figure 22.00.0120E. Backing up a partial data block.
Now I'm backing up an orange partial data block, and my backup doesn't include all of my data. There's data at Dropbox that isn't on this laptop, and so can't be included in a backup done from it. The bad news is, there's no easy solution to this problem.
As we'll see, I get around this by having a server with a massive hard drive. If you don't have that, there are other workarounds. This is outside the scope of this blog post, but we'll address it in a future post. As always, I'm happy to help. Just ask.
More backups is more good: 3-2-1
One more factor, as we nudge towards paranoia. But paranoia is good! Paranoia saves you from disaster.
It's good not to trust any one backup. Who knows what might go wrong? If it's in the cloud, the company might go bust. If it's on a hard drive in your drawer, you might plug that drive in and discover it's died.
The simple rule of thumb here is 3-2-1. You should have:
3 copies of your data (including the original),
on 2 different devices,
1 of which is off-site.
Synchronisation helps us with the first and second items. A copy here and a copy at Dropbox is already 2 copies, on 2 different devices. Your backup becomes the 3rd copy.
The third item is crucial. You might have 10 backups in your house; when your house burns down, none of them is going to do you any good! You must also have a backup 'off-site', and the cloud is the simplest solution.
If life goes well, you'll never, ever use it. But isn't that the very definition of 'insurance'?
Bonus points
For extra paranoia points, keep 2 complete backups. And for a 2× paranoia boost, use different software for each. It's good to have one backup 'locally', which might be a hard drive in your drawer. You can restore from this really quickly. And then one cloud backup, which fulfils the third criteria of having one 'off-site'.
Backup lesson over
That's a lot of theory, so I'm going to leave it there for now. In the next post, I'll show you my actual sync/backup diagram and dive into some of the details.
In this series
Here's the table of contents for this mini-series.
In the previous post, we left off by defining our blocks of data and noting their primary storage host.
20 years ago, that would have been the complete picture. You had files on your computer at home. If you wanted them somewhere else, you had to put them on an external drive and move them there yourself. And now you have two copies! Careful you don't update the wrong one…
Windows 95 shipped with Microsoft Briefcase, a feature intended to make this shuttling-of-data-between-computers easier. It was a cool idea, but I don't remember it working very well; certainly, it was never very popular. 💼
Dropbox
Then, in April 2007, Dropbox launched. It changed everything: suddenly, I could access my files anywhere I wanted. Dropbox introduced the concept of synchronisation to the general public.1
The first MacBook Air was launched in January the next year. If you don't watch the whole thing, make sure to watch Steve's reveal, another iconic moment in technology. With that, the number of people carrying a computer around with them exploded.
Suddenly, data was everywhere at once.
Everywhere?
So here's the problem. Theoretically -- in an ideal world -- your data could be everywhere at once. Nothing technically prevents it, and if you can do it, you probably should. It's way simpler.
Let's draw that diagram to see what it looks like.
Figure 22.00.0119A. The simplest ideal case: two full copies of your data.
In reality -- and this is my actual problem -- I have more data than can fit on a laptop. You might think that cloud storage space is the limiting factor, but it isn't. Cloud storage is essentially infinite: just pay a few extra quid a month. But this laptop has a 500GB hard drive and the only way to change that is by buying another laptop.
Selective/partial sync
The solution is obvious enough: don't synchronise everything. Only synchronise to each machine the stuff that you need on that machine. It's great that this is a solution…
…but we just cracked open the Complexity Egg. Before: nice neat situation. 🥚 After: complex mess all over the bench. Get a cloth. 🧽
Figure 22.00.0119B. Selectively synchronising a partial data block.
The problem with selective sync
To be clear: technically, this is no bother. This is what computers excel at.
The problem is that what was once simple, clear, and unambiguous -- all of my data is here and there -- is no longer the case. And now you have to think, this piece of data … do I want it here and there? Can I afford to keep it here? How long do I need to keep it here? And so on.
Embedded data; the different classes of data; different sync methods
Here's another consideration, which I'll just touch on briefly.
Data isn't neat. You don't just have one folder of stuff over here and another folder of stuff over there. You have one parent folder and it contains a bunch of stuff and some of that stuff is more important, and within it you might have a subfolder which is yet more important, and it's all embedded and inter-related.
And there isn't just one way of synchronising things. I use iCloud Drive for my Documents folder. Apple Photos has its own method of synchronisation. And I use 3rd-party software called Syncthing to keep data in sync with my server. I'll talk about Syncthing in a future post.
Once these introductory articles are finished we can go deeper on some of these topics. Just ask. But for now, baby steps.
My diagram
Here's how my real-world diagram looks.
Figure 22.00.0119C. A mostly-accurate representation of my data and its synchronisation.
This is where I think the diagram really starts to shine. Because I can still understand what's going on there. And as things change, I can come back and update it.
I've found that a general rule is that if you can't draw it, it's too complex. For sure I've built myself situations like that in the past. If yours is like that, it might be time to simplify.
That's more than enough for one day. Go and update your diagram, and don't forget to ask for help on the forum or Discord if you need it.
In this series
Here's the table of contents for this mini-series.
The launch post on Hacker News is famous in nerd circles because of the top-voted response in that thread.
User BrandonM responded (emphasis mine) that 'for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem'.
This massively understated just how much simpler Dropbox was. Drew Houston became very rich. Brandon did not. ↩
I wanted to explain what RSS was to those of you who don't already know. Because it's really great and you should be using it.
Like the postal service, for websites
Without RSS, you have a bunch of websites that you like visiting. (Why, thank you.) They put out regular content and you don't want to miss anything. So you remember them all and you go there regularly, or you leave tabs open and refresh them, or some other barbaric nonsense.
Here the onus is on you to fetch that content. You have to reach out to each individual place and grab what's new. You're going to miss things, or just forget things, and it's a lot of work.
Your mail gets delivered
This isn't how your postal mail works. Imagine if you had to go to each of your contacts and say, excuse me, do you have any new mail for me?
Eventually you'd forget to ask Aunty Doreen for her mail because it's always about Gerald and isn't he perfect and then she'd get upset and cut you out of the will.
RSS is like your postman
The mail service serves as an aggregator of your mail. They collect it all, bring it to one central place -- your mailbox -- and you can go there at your leisure and read about Gerald's latest test scores damn the little weasel he never fails.
Get some (free) software
We're going to use NetNewsWire because it's been around since the dawn of time, is free, and open source. (NewsBlur is a website that does the same job. And there are many others -- just search.)
Download it and go to File → New Feed… Copy/paste the URL of this blog post in there. Click Add. Done.
You'll see all of my old posts load. (You can select them all and 'mark as read'.) And when I publish new stuff, it'll just arrive. You don't need to do anything.
Add some more sites
The vast majority of blog-like sites have an 'RSS feed'. That's what NetNewsWire needs. But you don't need to care about that. I can't remember the last time that I had to do anything other than add any URL from the site. The feed should be discovered automatically.
That's it?
Basically. Stop going to sites. Let them come to you.
In the previous post we looked at your Storage [SBS.14.21]. Now let's consider your Data [SBS.14.22].
Data is all the stuff you make, or get sent, or download, or whatever. It's your stuff. It's the reason you use a computer.
Discovery
The first thing we're going to do is figure out what all of your data is. Not where it is, yet.
Start by thinking of the largest blocks of data. We'll crack each of these open later to see if there are any sub-classes within that need special consideration.
Mine mostly align with my Johnny.Decimal systems. Here's how they look at their highest level.
There's also a bunch of stuff that comes along with me just logging in to my laptop. Technically, we'd call that my 'user folder'. I've got the stuff on my Desktop, any extra files stored in my Pictures or Movies folders, my email1, and all of the configuration that I've done to make this laptop mine.
This isn't a lot of stuff, but it needs to be considered.
My photos library
For the sake of completion, let's consider my photos library. It's stored in Apple Photos and there are copies on my iPhone, my Mac, and in the cloud.
Diagram
Let's add this stuff to our diagram.
Figure 22.00.0116A. Adding my data to figure 22.00.0115A.
Primary data
I've added green shapes to indicate these primary data blocks. But why do I call them primary?
In the past, this was a lot simpler: if you had some data, it was almost certainly just on this disk or that disk. These days, you can trivially synchronise your data across multiple machines and the cloud. So this notion of exactly where any piece of data is has become less clear. Soon we'll see how each of these data blocks also exists in one or more secondary locations.
Data lives on storage
Let's place these data blocks on the devices that are their primary home. (Nerds say that the storage 'hosts' the data.)
P76 Johnny's personal life
We'll start with an easy one. Well ... kinda. At this point I'll note that the next post in this series will discuss synchronisation of your data. So don't worry if it feels like I'm skimming detail here: I am.
This block of data's primary home is on my iCloud Drive. That's the cloud service you get with a Mac: Windows users have OneDrive, or you might use a 3rd party service like Dropbox. The principles are the same and I'll just use 'iCloud' here for simplicity.2
But day-to-day I don't interact with my iCloud Drive. Where even is that? I don't open my laptop and use the cloud. I open my laptop and I want to interact with files that are on this laptop.3
░ Optimised/selective/partial synchronisation
iCloud is software, and its job is to synchronise files between this laptop, and the iCloud service. But not all files. I have 2TB of iCloud storage available to me, but this laptop only has a 0.5TB (500GB) hard drive. If I filled my iCloud Drive, I couldn't possibly carry it all around with me.
So iCloud has a setting, Optimise Mac Storage. Its descriptive text reads:
The full contents of iCloud Drive will be stored on this Mac if you have enough space. Older documents will be stored only in iCloud when space is needed.
What this is trying to tell us (I think it's poorly worded) is that the only place with a full copy of my iCloud Drive is iCloud. Not this Mac. This has implications later when we want to back this data up.
D25 Johnny.Decimal
This block of data is huge. It contains all of the original Workshop videos. Again, too big for either of our laptops.
So the primary location for this data is our server, the always-on Mac mini at my friend Alex's house.
My laptop
Unsurprisingly, the primary location for my user folder on my laptop is on the laptop.
My photos library
Similar to my iCloud Drive, the only place that all of my photos exist is on iCloud. On my Mac this setting is in Photos → Settings → iCloud tab → Optimise Mac Storage:
If your Mac is low on space, full-resolution photos and videos are automatically replaced with smaller, device-sized versions. Full-resolution versions can be downloaded from iCloud anytime.
This is a common pattern, e.g. Google Photos does the same sort of thing. Again, this has implications for your backups.
Diagram
Let's represent this all visually.
Figure 22.00.0116B. Placing data on its host storage.
Next time...
Without considering synchronisation, this is an incomplete view. We'll get to that in the next post.
For now your homework is to consider all of your blocks of data, to figure out their primary storage host, and to update your diagram. Again, don't worry about making it neat yet. There's still a bit to do.
And if you need any help, ask on the forum or Discord.
In this series
Here's the table of contents for this mini-series.
I use macOS Mail with an old-school mail account, not a cloud service like Gmail. ↩
They all have the same basic set of features, but they might have different names. For example, they all have the concept of selectively synchronising only certain data to certain machines. ↩
Noting for completeness that it is possible to interact with files directly in the cloud, typically by logging in to a website. It'd just be a horrible way to work day-to-day. ↩
This will be a short series focusing on the mechanics of storing, synchronising, and backing up your data. It doesn't matter what data: obviously mine is organised with Johnny.Decimal, but that's not a prerequisite. This post follows on from 22.00.0101 but will be expanded and more formal.
This was prompted by Chris on Discord, who asked how people go about doing this. And it ties in neatly with the Small Business System, where we designed section 14.20 ■ Storage, data, & backups.
My situation
Hopefully my specific situation is about as complex as it gets. We'll get in to the details, but briefly:
I no longer live anywhere permanently. So my internet is limited in speed and capacity, as I'm often tethering from a mobile connection.
Me and Lucy share the Johnny.Decimal system, so it needs to be on both of our laptops.
But it can't be in its entirety, because it's 800GB and wouldn't fit.1
I produce videos and need to synchronise 3GB+ of data between the laptops. (I record, Lucy edits.)
I have my own personal system, as does Lucy. I need to ensure they're both backed up.
I have an always-on Mac mini with 16TB of attached storage in my friend Alex's house, as well as an 8TB Synology.
I subscribe to various cloud sync and backup services.
I don't want to spend any more than necessary.
Storage
The order of that SBS header is very deliberate. Storage comes first.
Because it refers to the places that your data might be. You can't store data in thin air: it must be on some device, drive, or service.
This might be:
Your laptop or desktop computer.
A mobile device.
An external drive.
This might be a large array of HDDs, a smaller SSD, or a USB drive.
A cloud sync provider, e.g. Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive.
A cloud backup provider, e.g. Backblaze.
And so the first step is just being aware of these places. You could do this with a note in your JDex, but I think a diagram works really well here. Let's start one: I use Diagrams, but anything will do. Excalidraw is a simple online diagramming tool.
JD implementation detail
Rather than always noting that I'm going off on a tangent, I'll start putting JD implementation details in an orange box like this.
When you create this diagram -- especially if it's online somewhere like
Excalidraw -- don't assume you'll remember where it is. You won't.
Make a note in your JDex. I always put this sort of thing 'above the line' at the top of the note.
If it is online, make your note a [markdown](link://) directly to it.
Diagram
Let's start this diagram with blocks that represent our storage. It will help if you make these blocks all the same shape and/or colour. Here, I've used Diagrams and created a key to the shapes.
Figure 22.00.0115A. My storage devices or locations.
You can right-click any of these images and 'open in new tab' to expand them.
Prefer simplicity over accuracy
This diagram isn't technically accurate. The server curium is a low-spec Mac mini with almost no internal storage. Actually its storage is on a 16TB external drive. In early versions of my diagram I tried to represent this, but I found it confused more than it helped. I know what I mean here. You should do the same.
Next time...
I'll keep each of these posts focused on a specific topic. That's it for storage: your homework is to understand where your stuff could be, and start some sort of diagram.
Don't worry about making it neat for now. We'll be adding a lot more to it and moving things around next time.
And if you need any help, ask on the forum or Discord.
In this series
Here's the table of contents for this mini-series.
Much of that 800GB being the original Workshop video files. Fortunately I have no need for them on this laptop, but I don't want to delete them unless I have to. ↩
─ Pre-built JD systems
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
┐
Life Admin: the stuff we
all manage day-to-day. How
Johnny organises his life.
Small business: stop losing
important files. Focus on
your business; let us be
your in-house admin.
Save hundreds of hours.
We figured it out so that
you don't have to.
