Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of being unsupervised. I'm your friend David

Pierce, and I'm doing, I think I've talked about this on the show before, my annual-ish,

full-on backup of everything. So over the years, I've basically developed a rule about how I think

about files and folders and stuff.

I want to have them in three places.

And anything that doesn't allow this, I try not to use.

I want to have all my stuff in whatever app I'm using,

whether it's notes or photos or to-dos or bookmarks or whatever.

I want to have it all somewhere.

And then I want to have it all in some other sort of

cloud storage thing, Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft, pick your poison. And then I want to have it all

somewhere on a physical drive. And that usually means things like text backups and a lot of like

HTML and PDF downloads. And this is the time of year when I try to make sure that all of that is intact.

In theory, I should do this a lot more often.

I should do this like once a month or once a week.

There was a time where I did it once a week and was like very diligent and proud of

myself.

Not so much recently.

So now what I'm doing is I'm downloading all of my photos.

I'm downloading all of my notes as text and markdown files. I'm downloading all of the bookmarks and stuff I have. I'm downloading like browser history, which I'm confident is not a thing I'm ever going to need. But basically anything I can turn into some kind of searchable, archivable file gets downloaded, gets put on a drive like this one. I have a couple of them

lying around, and I try to just make sure it all lives there. This is a way of backing everything

up without making my life more complicated, which I like, right? This is just like a permanent

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