Section 23.8. Trust Me About the Backups

23.8. Trust Me About the Backups

Here's a little more backup humor that has been passed around the Internet a few times. This is another parody, attributed to Charles Meigh, based on the song "Use Sunscreen," by Mary Schmich, which was a rewrite of a speech attributed to Kurt Vonnegut. (He never actually wrote or gave the speech.) Oh, never mind. Just read it!

Back up your hard drive.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, backing up would be it.

The necessity of regular backups is shown by the fact that your hard drive has a MTBF printed on it, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the freedom and innocence of your newbieness.

Oh, never mind. You will not understand the freedom and innocence of newbieness until they have been overtaken by weary cynicism.

But trust me, in three months, you'll look back on groups.google.com at posts you wrote and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how witty you really were.

You are not as bitter as you imagine.

Write one thing every day that is on topic.

Chat.

Don't be trollish in other people's newsgroups.

Don't put up with people who are trollish in yours.

Update your virus software.

Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind.

The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember the praise you receive.

Forget the flames.

If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Get a good monitor.

Be kind to your eyesight.

You'll miss it when it's gone.

Maybe you'll lurk, maybe you won't.

Maybe you'll meet F2F, maybe you won't.

Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either.

Your choices are half chance.

So are everybody else's.

Enjoy your Internet access.

Use it every way you can.

Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it.

It's a privilege, not a right.

Read the readme.txt, even if you don't follow it.

Do not read Unix manpages.

They will only make you feel stupid.

Get to know your fellow newsgroup posters.

You never know when they'll be gone for good.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few, you should hold on.

Post in r.a.sf.w.r-j, but leave before it makes you hard.

Post in a.f.e, but leave before it makes you soft.

Browse.

Accept certain inalienable truths: spam will rise. Newsgroups will flamewar. You too will become an oldbie.

And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were a newbie, spam was rare, newsgroups were harmonious, and people read the FAQs.

Read the FAQs.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those that supply it.

Advice is a form of nostalgia.

Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the logs, reformatting it, and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the backups.

BackupCentral.com has a wiki page for every chapter in this book. Read or contribute updated information about this chapter at http://www.backupcentral.com.