Let me elaborate on that ambiguous subtitle. Upon waking up this weekend afternoon (yes, afternoon), the first notification on my iPhone said:

It’s been 3 weeks since you’ve last backed up your iPhone. Backups occur when your iPhone is connected to power and WiFi.

I’ve always backed up my phone to the cloud. In case anything goes wrong, I don’t want to lose my data and easily be able to retrieve it. Upon scrambling through iOS settings, I observe that my iCloud storage limit of 5gb was running out. Now, here’s the thing – I also keep my Mac’s Documents and Desktop folder on the cloud and it’s synchronized¹. To free up storage temporarily, I disable the sync and delete the data to free up space for my iPhone’s backup. And that’s where it all goes wrong.

Before performing this stupidity, I thought that deleting from iCloud meant that the backup would get deleted, because the files were still safe in my Mac’s hard drive. When I open up my Mac in the evening, I lose my mind and my heart skips a beat. All my important files – financial, university-related, travel documents – gone with the wind. I look through my filesystem to see if there’s any way Apple might’ve implemented redundancy and kept a copy. I couldn’t find anything. Reddit users confirmed that it was all gone!

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

– Sir Isaac Newton

Here’s the good part – I had the PDF of my resume, so it took me half an hour to reconstruct it in LaTeX. Everything else is either a digital version of a hard copy or something that can be downloaded again from the internet. I have reconstruct all of them though. And there were some old files that served as memory rabbit holes which are now sadly gone. 😭

Here’s the real problem. Despite being a computer nerd and generally cautious before making irreversible changes, I screwed up. What stops everyone else who isn’t like me? I’m not the only one who’s made this mistake. And perhaps there’s some mistake on Apple’s end as well². I regularly hear people losing photos, contacts, and other important files.

So, what’s the solution? Redundancy is simply the act of storing additional data copies. After losing multiple photos due corruption in a hard drive, my dad now stores our family memories in multiple hard drives. That’s called local redundancy. Storing them in the cloud allows for even more redundancy. (Read: The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy)

Even if redundancy sounds like a costly affair, one backup is always better than none. Microsoft for Education offers all students 1 terabyte of OneDrive. In relative terms, that’s equivalent to 41 hours of video content. Google and Apple offer storing contacts in the cloud. Immich allows self hosted backups and sync of photos. GitHub offers unlimited storage for code repositories. At the end of the day, moral of the story is – don’t make the mistake I did, and back up your data. For your sake!