Why we need to go to space
When I had my first PC in the 90ies I was into making music for a while. I had a software where I could arrange samples (little snippets of audio) into tracks. Over a short time I gathered hundreds of samples from tracks I came across and liked. Out of these I composed over a dozen songs – it was supposed to be my first album. Then the disaster happened: my hard drive failed. The data on it was not readable anymore.
Back then hard drives were very expensive. You would have had only one in your computer most likely. Everything is stored on that one drive. Same for backup-solutions: they were very expensive. You might have had a ZIP drive or even more primitive forms of storing large amount of data. But this was almost exclusively used in companies who could not afford to lose it’s data. Even today having a backup data outside a company is rare. The problem slowly disappears today with everything moving to the cloud. But remember, we talk about the 90ies.
Let’s rewind back to 1996
I did not have a backup back then. Hours and hours of my labour of love was just gone! Friends tried to help me; they hooked up my disk to their computer to see what’s still readable. They even ran some tools trying to recover bits that got lost. But there wasn’t a lot that could be done. I lost most my files and almost all my samples. All that was left was maybe a hundred samples and a handful of songs.
Lessons learned
Duplicate what’s valuable and store it somewhere else. That’s how it works everywhere nowadays, not only in IT: everything of importance is duplicated or has a failover.
Backup for humanity
We need a backup plan for humanity. We need a failover if something goes wrong with our current population. What could go wrong? How to create a backup of mankind?
Founder ?and investor ?
Environmentalist ? and futurist ?
Here I think out loud and talk about things. Opinions are my own but happy to share.