It’s good to have backups. It’s even better to document the backup and recovery procedure, and to test the backups regularly. Here’s where I am in terms of backups and what I’m working on next.

The biggest weaknesses I need to work on are:

• Testing my image backups without risking my main computer – maybe a different drive.
• Setting up offsite backups, probably handled by swapping encrypted drives and keeping one stored at HackLab
• Cloning my backup VM into a development VM with proper version control and committing, so I can easily copy changes over

I’ve grabbed files from my backup a few times, and I’m so glad I had them. I wish I’d been better at keeping financial statements and things like that from earlier. I have Ledger records but no electronic statements from 2009. I’ve gotten much better at saving statements every month, so now they’re part of my regular archives. Working on it!