My Samsung Galaxy S II is an excellent media consumption device. With it, I can easily check out what's new in the RSS feeds I subscribe to (with Google Reader), at HN and reddit. It also lets me watch videos on YouTube.
The SGSII is also OK for some creation of content, such as:
- Leaving a short comment or question on $RANDOM_WEBSITE,
- drawing "abstract" doodles with Infinite Design[1],
- (attempts at) creating music with CAUSTIC 2, and
- simple (to mean rather limited, but also quite effortless) video editing with Movie Aid.
Since I don't log in to that many services, I use the built-in password manager in Dolphin Browser for some of the sites, and other sites, I just remember the password to.
For more demanding content creation, I mostly use my laptop (a 13-inch "Mid 2012" MacBook Pro). I also use the laptop to access various (quite many) websites and services. On my laptop, I have installed the LastPass plugin for Google Chrome. I have it configured to remember my LastPass username and password. I also used to have a plain text file with my LastPass account details on a stationary computer standing in my room.
One day I shut down said stationary computer to move it. Then, it occurred to me that I had full disk encryption on that computer. And I could not remember the password. So I wiped the disks since the contents were basically garbage now (that password file was the only thing I did not have other backups of).
Shortly after, my MacBook Pro failed to boot. zOMG.
It would have been annoying to have to reset all of those passwords. (Knowing that this could happen, I have memorized the password for my e-mail, and if I forget it and am unable to reset it, I can change the MX records for my domain and use another provider than Google).
I got the laptop back from service, and there was no apparent dataloss.
I have a habit of forgetting passwords I rarely use, but I remembered the password for my laptop even though more than two weeks had passed since the last time I logged on to it. Lucky, considering that I have FileVault encryption enabled on the laptop.
I signed in to LastPass with the credentials that the computer remembered for me, did an account recovery to change the LastPass password. Then I saved the LastPass password in plain text on an USB stick.
While I was at it, modifying account settings, I enabled Google Authenticator for LastPass. So now, I know that my USB stick with the plain text file alone is not enough to gain access to my LastPass account, while also knowing that I have the LastPass password at a place where, barring USB stick device failure, I can retrieve it, should I need it. I also generated some one-time passwords for LastPass and put them on the USB stick.
Next, I enabled Google Authenticator on my Google accounts for good measure and generated one-time passwords for them as well.
The final step, which is the only thing I haven't done yet, is to print the one-time password sheets, and to put the plain text files on another USB stick which I will keep at a separate physical location.
As for the things I create, I put code on my GitHub (not much there yet) and keep important files on at least two of the following places:
- My laptop,
- a stationary computer with two mirrored disks,
- Google Drive,
- Ubuntu One,
- Dropbox,
- my home directory at the University of Oslo, or
- my home directory at the student group PING.
I have experienced data loss before, both as a result of drive failure, and because I was an idiot and deleted stuff without thinking about what I was about to delete.
I am quite satisfied with the way I currently backup my data, but I want to "streamline" it even more.
[1]: (I think a tablet would be better suited for this task, but I'm no artist, so I don't really need to be able to draw with great detail.) ↩