{"id":2092,"date":"2016-07-31T17:57:27","date_gmt":"2016-07-31T12:27:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/?p=2092"},"modified":"2016-07-31T17:57:27","modified_gmt":"2016-07-31T12:27:27","slug":"freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/2016\/07\/freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #333333\"><em>This post is not about how to recover from a crashed disk. It&#8217;s about how not to let a disk crash affect you in the first place&#8230;<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p>A few weeks ago, the hard disk of my home computer crashed. Just like that. It wouldn&#8217;t turn back on. I ran some diagnostics using a recovery drive to check if there was any chance of salvaging it (the hardware, not the data), but there wasn&#8217;t. So I unplugged it, ordered another one, and went about my business on another device.<\/p>\n<p>When the new drive arrived a few days later, it took me less than 30 minutes\u00a0to have it up and running with every thing I needed.\u00a0No data files to transfer. No settings to copy down or migrate. No nothing.<\/p>\n<p>This was the goal when I began moving to a device-independent setup a few years ago. Piece by piece, I had successfully moved every thing I ever do on a computer to the cloud, so that if the day came when my hard disk crashed, I would not be affected.<\/p>\n<p>And, it was satisfying to see that it worked! Today, all the mobile and computing devices I\u00a0use (at home or at work) are irrelevant when it comes to the <em>data<\/em> they work with. It&#8217;s all online. Synced in real time. No fuss. No muss.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what\u00a0works for me&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">Laptops\/PCs<\/span>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Google Calendar &#8211; To manage multiple calendars online; Synced across devices<\/li>\n<li>GMail &#8211; For my work\/personal emails; Synced across devices<\/li>\n<li>Google Drive &#8211; For all my personal work documents; Synced across home PCs\/laptops I frequently use<\/li>\n<li>Box.com &#8211; For all home\/common documents;\u00a0Synced across PCs<\/li>\n<li>Evernote &#8211; For long notes; Synced across devices<\/li>\n<li>SimpleNote &#8211; For short notes; Synced across devices<\/li>\n<li>Google Photos &#8211; To backup any photos I shoot (on the phone\/cameras) to\u00a0my Google account<\/li>\n<li>Pocket (plus its Chrome Extension) &#8211; To save any bookmarks from my phone or PC that I need to read\/retrieve later<\/li>\n<li>ToDoist (plus its Chrome Extension) &#8211; To save any To Do items (with\/without reminders)\u00a0from my phone or PC<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">Mobile Devices<\/span>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>An Android device serves as my primary mobile phone<\/li>\n<li>All my Contacts are saved on a Google account &#8211; nothing is saved\/stored on the phone<\/li>\n<li>SMS Backup &amp; Restore &#8211; To periodically save SMS messages &amp; threads (when migrating from one phone to another)<\/li>\n<li>Google Photos &#8211; To auto backup any photos shot on my mobile device<\/li>\n<li>Apps for SimpleNote, Evernote, ToDoist, Pocket and Drive, as above<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">Second Level\u00a0Backups<\/span>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>All documents &amp; pictures from any computers I use are also\u00a0backed up &#8211; once a year &#8211; to two\u00a0external (portable)\u00a0hard disks&#8230; This goes in a folder with the name YYYY<\/li>\n<li>I also keep one of the two external disks in a remote\u00a0location as\u00a0an offsite backup, just in case<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s it, really! This simple setup now enables me to work from anywhere, with instant access to all my data, as long as I have an Internet connection. Plus, if one device fails, I can literally switch over to another in minutes, without any loss of data.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This post is not about how to recover from a crashed disk. It&#8217;s about how not to let a disk crash affect you in the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,11,14],"class_list":["post-2092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-life","tag-technology","tag-work"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}