A Disadvantage of Auto-Cloud Backup

I was not paying attention to my knitting, as my grandmother might have said.

I was updating a school to-do list in Evernote on my phone: assignment due dates, ideas for new classes, websites that I copied but not had gotten around to viewing yet, and so on. The digital detritus of a modern working guy. The "Cloud" ties the Evernote app into my phone, iPad, home PC and Mac and the various desktops at school offices and labs. I have categories for school, home, and garden; a quote list (I write them down as I see them); a daily to-do list; a list of books I want to read and I list of books I have read during the current year.

At this time of the year, the school list has been pared down to essentials: to-dos I want to complete during the summer and to-dos I want to take up in the fall. Still, there were more than two-dozen items on the note. I was rushed one night, multitasking, and made one too many clicks. The entire file was highlighted (select-all is always a dangerous choice) in a pale blue box with one click, and the next quick key stroke replaced the entire list with the single letter, "r".

Gone. Everything. Was. Gone.

I looked around for the salvation of an "Undo" icon -- no icon. I knew if I closed the file, the information (as little as there was) would be uploaded to the Cloud (handy automatic feature that) and the lower case "r" would replace two years of ideas. And, no, there had been no print-out backup. Instead, I fired up another machine in another room and signed into Evernote from there. As I suspected, the earlier file had not yet been updated across the system (the first computer file was still open), so I forced a sync with the Cloud to keep the file from the second machine rather than the r-file. The sync was complete. All was saved, sort of.

What I had were two competing files with the same name on two different machines. Eventually there was going to be a problem. Rather than hope for the best, never a good idea when working with technology, I renamed the second school file as "School 2014-15" and re-synced. Again, successful. So I had the original school file and the second, renamed file.

I turned back to the phone and when I clicked off the file screen, as I suspected, the "r-file" was uploaded as "School" and populated all devices. The Cloud is very thorough. But, I had my original work, other than some rushed tweaking, under the name of the new file, "School 2014-15." I also had the file, "School" with a lone "r" in it. I think I will keep it as a reminder for a while

Losing the original file would not have been the end of the world. I would have eventually recreated the items. But, an absent-minded slip of attention and errant keystroke would have cost me time and anxiety. In an earlier generation, I would have said this was a lesson about backing up, but it's not really -- backing up is an automatic process today. Instead this a story about slowing down, paying attention to your knitting, and then when digital disaster strikes, trying to stay calm and keep on computing.