Leaving Home - How to organize and secure your data I
What is ‘my data’ and what’s not? In my understanding data is ‘content I’ve created’ and ‘content I use’ - pretty easy. Everything else is either setup-information or … just stuff. But what about MP3s and Movies? Music and Movies is data that is not related to my person and information that I share or willing to share with other people.
I like the idea how Mac OS X is handling user-information (everything is stored in one directory in /Users/) but it has some limitations. It’s easy to copy ‘all’ the data from one system to another by moving the home folder. But it’s not that easy to make a backup of ‘my data’. Office Documents are stored in ~/Documents (~/ is an alias for your home-directory), your Adressbook, Calendars, Bookmakrs are somewhere in ~/Library/, your MP3s are in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music and if you’re using Virtual PC (VPC), you’ll see large .vpc-files in your ~/Documents-folder.
The problem:
- You need to search for ‘your’ data in various places
- You don’t really know how big the amount of ‘your’ data is. If I would just leave everything in my home-folder, it would be 3x bigger than my built-in harddrive of 30 GB.
- Often you don’t think about an effective way to organize your data and that can result in clutter… I hear you GTF-geeks screaming
- It’s not easy to make backups
- It’s not easy to secure the privacy of your documents
The Solution:
- Decide what is ‘your data’. This could be all type of documents, calendars, adressbooks, financial planes, todo lists, pictures …
- Decide what kind of data is not ‘your data’ but important for you. This could be reference documents, backup of applications, movies, music, audio books …
- Since the amount of data that is not from you, but important for you will grow, think about how you want to organize these files. Some people have lots of music files, add some movies and you’ll realice that even a 250 GB harddrive is full. Thinking about data-management before you need to think about it, make life easier.
After playing around with different ideas and software-apps like DEVONthink, Owl Intranet Engine and some others I decided to take another approach:
The ‘leaving-home-method’:
- Move ‘your data’ out of home.
- Move MP3s, Movies, Software, eBooks out of home.
- Leave your Home-Directory just for settings and application-related data
- Backup. Backup often. Backup on different media.
- Make sure that ‘your data’ is for your-eyes-only. Use encryption technology.
- Use search-methods without a need to adding metadata to your files (LaunchBar). No I don’t have Spotlight yet.
I’ll cover all these aspects in the next postings - stay tuned.