> Seriously, I can't imaging doing something like research or writing PhD thesis and not having at least one off-site backup. And yet people do this. Last year

> Seriously, I can't imaging doing something like research or writing PhD thesis and not having at least one off-site backup. And yet people do this. Last year I read a newspaper article of a guy who worked 2 years on his PhD thesis but then forgot his laptop in a bus and now those 2 years of work are gone forever. The real problem here is not just backups, though. It's a severe ignorance of technology and its limitations that leads to such carelessness. The old saying about advanced tech seeming like magic should be a warning. No sane person goes out into the rain without an umbrella thinking they just won't get wet because yesterday they didn't, as it's painfully obvious that water is wet. Yet when someone stores everything on a single point of failure they don't lose a second of sleep of what could go wrong, it's simply not in their perceived range of possibilities that e.g. a hard drive could fail.