Quote:
Originally Posted by Sydney's Mom
Now that I have listed all of this, it sounds kind of excessive.  How about you? How many backups do you have? |
Yes, nine copies does sound like the road to Weirdsville may not be too far down the track...
Just kidding.
I have one extra copy - a regular backup of the main computer - which is stored separately. Any more seems unnecessary, but that's just a personal choice.
All the books that are on my hard drive could be downloaded again from the place I got them from. In the event that the site had gone or the book been deleted, then I could retrieve it from the backup.
As I also have more than one portable reading device I do temporarily end up with more than one copy, while they're actively being read. But my focus is on keeping the number of multiples down, not up. I see the clutter as a nuisance rather than an asset.
To put it into perspective, I have over 2,000 printed books and not one of them are "backed up". They're all just single volumes. I could lose any or all of those books through fire, theft, or plain old carelessness. It's a possibility, but I don't lose sleep over it.
The worst thing that could happen to me is that an ebook could go missing. In my case, this would be more likely to happen because I had lost track of some overly cluttered and complicated system than because a book simultaneously vanished from both the Internet and my computer. I also only re-read a fairly small percentage of books, so it mostly wouldn't bother me if I couldn't retrieve one that I'd already read anyway.
But if push came to shove, and I managed to lose both on and off-line copies, then I'd be prepared to buy a favourite book again. To me that would cost a lot less than the value of the time I would waste managing multi-layer backups, let alone the cost of the extra hardware or on-line backup space.
It really depends on what floats your boat. If you're a worrier, or if you actually enjoy the procedures involved in making elaborate backups - and some people clearly do - then that's cool too.
Cheers,
Chris