I mean, you called it crap and then said it's super important. That's what hoarders say.
Subjectively you may feel that your data is super important, but objectively it probably isn't.
When people talk about 'super important' (totally a technical term), I think of things like DB backups in software companies, backups of financial reporting for firms, etc. Not your tax return from 2008.
My nginx config is not super important. My old reports written for study are not super important. My pirated movie copies are not super important.
These are examples of data that I could easily live without. Where losing it would either be a matter of re-doing old work, or just forgetting about old and minor things.
>What is this mythical unimportant data that people still want to back up?
I have lots of stuff like this. Often it is easier to just back up an entire folder than go through sub/sub folders separating stuff into: important, not very important. Storage costs are low enough to just backup everything (almost). Also, one often doesn't know what may be important/useful in future. For example a couple of years ago I had this huge buildroot system (600gb) to build firmware images for a single board computer I spent quite a while to put together. The project I was doing it for got cancelled so I had no need to keep it. Still I wish I did, as I'd love to be able to tinker with it now, but 600gb is not a trivial amount to store so it got deleted. Most of this data was pulled from various online resources that don't exist anymore too.
What's the morale of my story? If you have a fast internet connection (I don't) backup "everything" to cloud. Then find "really important stuff" like the pictures of your children etc and back it up again to a different cloud.
If you're in a middle of nowhere on a slow LTE connection like me, building a nas box is not a bad idea for backups.
Anything that you stashed just for convenience, but you could re-download or re-generate it if really needed, or simply live without it... frankly, like 90% of stuff on my disks fall in the category "I'll read/view it one day", which in reality I'll probably never have time or patience to open ever again.
I really used to enjoy formatting my machines about every 6 months.
Well I used to until macOS kinda went off the rails a bit. Now it’s mostly an exercise in running my arch script for my thinkpad.
Being stuck between operating systems is kinda a mess though, makes backup and file sync in general really hard. But everyone’s gotta have their own cloud, right?!
Why can’t I just put a cloud under my bed and forget about it?
> Why can’t I just put a cloud under my bed and forget about it?
Just buy a Synology NAS. Keep default settings, set up a few user accounts, tweak a few things here and there, enable encryption, install Active Backup on all your devices, done.
There are many cheaper/more open options for self-owned NAS storage, but contrary to a Synology they're definitely far and away from "and forget about it".
