maintenance
I am just a little bit obsessive about backups, by which I mean I have external hard drives to back up my external hard drives which are backing up my computer which is also being backed up on a cloud service, all of which is automated. My most irreplaceable and precious media (my Blu-ray rips) are additionally backed up on a different cloud service and yet another hard drive. Every last Sunday of the month, I also run exports of various Things—bookmarks, budget file, read-later list, password manager database, anything I would be annoyed to lose that doesn’t already get backed up in more than one place.
It seems kinda extra when I type it all up like that, but I have to credit my backup habits for making it trivially easy to transition to a new OS, and to distrohop. I can at any minute wipe my hard drive and be up and running again in under an hour because all my stuff is easily stored where I can retrieve it. I also have a very detailed “fresh OS setup” checklist that I keep in a text file and can retrieve on my phone while the computer is being restored, so I don’t feel overwhelmed with all the things I need to do.
All this to say, my digital life is just about as failsafe as I think I can get it, but there are times I realise that the same does not apply to my analog life, and it always catches me a little bit off guard.
Yesterday I discovered cracks in my trusty Delter coffee press which rendered it nigh unusable because hot water was seeping out of the cracks every time I pressed down on the plunger. Okay, I thought, I can survive this—this is why I kept my spare Aeropress around—but when I pulled it out, I discovered to my great chagrin that the silicone at the bottom of the Aeropress plunger had degraded so much over the years of atrophying in my cabinet that it no longer formed an airtight seal, which also meant my Aeropress was unusable.
Not being able to make coffee in the morning is pretty catastrophic in my book. (Thankfully, I managed to order a replacement Delter press which arrived the next day.)
IRL things aren’t so easy to back up and replace. One of my favourite pairs of pants recently got stained with acrylic paint, and if my efforts to get it out don’t work, I can’t buy the exact same pants again as they aren’t being made/sold any more. I have a cracked double-walled tumbler that I love and similarly cannot replace as it’s out of production. I can’t wear in-ear earbuds because I find them super uncomfortable, so I have at least three different sets of wired flathead earbuds (like the Apple EarPods) lying around because I don’t want to be caught in a situation where I lose or break my one and only pair and am stuck because Apple doesn’t make them any more.
Unlike digital backup, physical backup isn’t set-it-and-forget-it. And of course, as a homeowner, it feels like some unexpected thing is going to break at least several times a year. I’m not going to have a backup aircon or oven lying around if mine stops working. Nor do I have the space to, or want to become, the sort of hoarder who has a backup oven lying around.
I guess where I’m unspooling this thought is, at some point, you just have to swallow the fact that maintenance is an inextricable part of life. Maintenance is life. Life is maintenance. You will never be able to perfectly back up all of the things, much as you try (I am perfectly aware that hard drives can fail, backups can get corrupted, cloud services can go down, etcetc). Something breaking doesn’t mean life is broken. It means life is carrying on more or less as it is expected to, and you will deal with the broken thing somehow, and keep on trucking. Which is all oddly comforting, once I zoom out and look at things that way.