I spent most of Sunday afternoon crouched on the floor of my office with a Phillips head screwdriver and a dead 4TB WD My Book, trying to figure out if the drive itself had failed or if it was just the USB bridge board being its usual garbage self. Spoiler: it was the bridge board. It's always the bridge board with these things. WD ships a perfectly fine drive mechanism inside an enclosure with electronics that seem designed to die around the four-year mark, and then they sell you a new external drive instead of just letting you swap the SATA cable out yourself. I ended up pulling the bare drive, hooking it up through an old SATA-to-USB dock I've had since maybe 2016, and it spun right up like nothing happened. Every file intact. Ten years of blog photos, half-finished drafts, screenshots I took for posts I never published.
That last part is what actually derailed my afternoon. I wasn't supposed to be reading old drafts. I was supposed to be verifying the backup and moving on with my day. Instead I found a folder called "posts-2013" and lost an hour and a half.
On finding your own bad writing
Some of it holds up okay. Most of it doesn't. There's a post from early 2013 where I confidently explained why tablets were a fad and phones would just get bigger instead — which, fine, I got the phones-get-bigger part right, but I said it with this tone like I'd cracked some code nobody else had noticed. There's another one complaining about Google Reader shutting down that reads like I thought civilization was ending. I remember being genuinely upset about that. I'm still a little upset about it, honestly, thirteen years later, which says more about me than about Google.
What struck me more than the content was how much shorter everything was back then. Four hundred words, maybe five hundred, no subheadings, just a paragraph or two and a link and done. I don't know exactly when that changed for me. Somewhere in there I started treating this blog like it needed to justify its own existence with more structure, more "here's my framework for thinking about this," and I'm not sure that's an improvement. Sometimes I think the best posts here were the ones where I just said the thing and stopped.
The backup situation, for real this time
Anyway. The actual point of the afternoon was supposed to be about backup hygiene, so let me not bury that entirely. My current setup is a mess and I know it: one external drive that apparently only survives on borrowed time, a Backblaze subscription I pay $9 a month for and mostly forget exists, and a Synology NAS in the closet that I have not actually tested a restore from in probably two years. That last part is the dangerous one. Everyone talks about backups like the hard part is having them. The hard part is knowing they actually work when you need them, and I did not know that until Sunday, when it turned out fine, but could easily not have.
So here's the actual advice, if you want it: pick one weekend a year, doesn't matter which, and actually pull a random file off your "backup" and confirm it opens and isn't corrupted. Not a big project. Fifteen minutes. I've been telling myself I do this and I have not been doing this. I did it Sunday for the first time in longer than I want to admit, purely by accident, because a drive died and forced my hand.
I also finally bought a second bare drive dock so I'm not dependent on any single enclosure's electronics again. $28 on Amazon, does nothing fancy, just exposes the SATA connector to USB-C. If you're still buying pre-built external drives for anything you actually care about keeping, I'd gently suggest buying a bare drive and a dock instead — cheaper per terabyte most of the time anyway, and when the bridge board dies (it will) you're not locked out of your own data.
I put the WD enclosure itself in a drawer. Not sure why. Some kind of monument to bad electronics engineering, I guess. My wife asked what it was for and I didn't have a good answer.
Fourteen years and change of this blog now, if you're counting from November 2011, which apparently I am, because I found the very first post in that same folder crawl and reread it too. It's fine. It's short. Maybe that's the lesson from the whole afternoon, not the backups.