Last night I was strolling about my digital empire, and became a bit alarmed about how many backups of backups I had. I started unfolding a few archives, and kept finding websites or applications I’d written that existed only in that one backup. And then, the methods of backing up were all done differently. I have reason to be concerned.

In the current state of things, it’s going to be difficult to reconcile everything into a single concise heirarchy. It can be done, but it will take time, and planning. I’ve done it before with over 10,000 photographs, and could do it again, but don’t relish the thought.

But more forboding is, once I’ve consilidated all my creative works and placed them in a central and core location, how do I make sure I don’t branch things off into different places in the future?

I think that maybe I need to be taught how to be a good backer-upper. Or I need simple software that handles it all for me. I envision a tool that I install on all my machines, whether they’re Linux based, OS X, or Windows, that looks at folders I want saved, and watches for my changes. When the state of the folder changes, it automatically reflects those changes on my “backup server”. It would need to be able to rollback too, in case the change was something nasty (like a file mistakenly deleted). Now, I know there are tools for this (maybe a Linux based fileserver with a journalling file system and some type of sync tool) but I want simple. Read: easy.

Maybe something already exists, but until it does, I’m going to have to do it the hard way which, as far as I can tell, is pretty much the only way at this point.