Backup Everything

In '100 best pieces of life advice', an article I feel way too sad about the world to finish and post, there are a few pieces of advice light and practical enough that I could think about sharing. One of them is, "Backup Everything".

The most obvious and practical use of this is that when I was younger I did not know how other people had a "D drive" on their computer and such. These are external harddrives you need to buy, physical objects that can be small like a USB stick (such as '32GB USB Flash Drive Memory Stick') or expensive and larger ('1TB Ultra Slim Portable External Hard Drive'). These $70 1TB drives are obviously essential objects, but at the sad beg-parents-for-everything stage that children have to suffer through, this will be a hard sell and you definitely don't want to make the mistake of your computer not having the USB 2.0 or 3.0 port necessary to connect it after you get it.

If you don't have access to those, you still have lots of options for free storage, on mediafire, mega.nz, Google Drive, uploading your videos as private videos. These are probably big enough for your purposes, however certain larger projects may not fit.

Besides that though, other mentalities of "Backup Everything" that are deeply worth it:

• I had absurd nostalgia of the very first levels I ever made for games. Unfortunately I do not have much of them anymore.
• Archive your favorite videos and comments on them!
• It has never been more dissatisfying and disproving of "everything on the internet forever" when there's so many pieces of music gone, music channels taken down, sometimes not even by the actual owner of the music, sometimes by a rent-seeker who just bought the rights. Watching a youtube playlist with 60 videos turning into "24 unavailable" and forgetting what music or videos were in it is so stupid.
• Also having music from niche creators that no one else thought to archive is a special experience.

A few new reasons came up after I started to feel more unhappy, and Backup Everything still benefits:

• Record good memories and great pieces of media and excellent moments so you won't forget them later (there are a few webcomics and posts I no longer remember)
• Screen record your stuff or yourself to see how far you've come since X years ago, you can even make a time capsule video
• It's always a good idea to save a copy or screenshot of things you see online to keep an accurate record of past events. Ideas and popular opinions change, and people sometimes forget or deny that harmful trends were ever widely supported or considered a good idea. Being in this situation and having no evidence of what you saw firsthand, now there's not even a word for that emotion. Probably boomers actually have some of these moments with no evidence.
• You also don't want to be like that cursed soul who came up with an insight and later found out already having come up with the same insight 2 years ago. Seriously don't.
• Thinking of ideas is just so worth it in general, especially as you can build off of it and sort through your notes and topics

Frog.

(There was going to be an article about other 'meta' games, however my writing style has already changed massively from when I wrote that article like 5 months ago that I no longer feel comfortable posting it, amazing.)