Currently I have 177 bookmarks. That’s right, just 177 websites have been fortunate enough to find their way into my web browser, and survive long enough to be saved, cataloged, tagged, and then released back into the wild. To be fair, I had well over 3,500 bookmarks using Ma.gnolia, a service that I can’t even link to because it died. The server the website was running on crashed, the owner of the site said that the backups were corrupt, and I managed to successfully recover 12 bookmarks….ugh.
This was back in 2009, and to say that it’s been hard being able to trust web 2.0 start ups with my data again is a gross understatement; I’d sooner attempt a tooth extraction with a wine key than put that much time and effort into creating another database I didn’t have control over (which is why I have automatic weekly backups of this website sent to me via e-mail, saved to my internal hard drive, and then backed up on another external drive). It’s been slow going, and while I’m still a bit anxious about “getting back on the horse”, Diigo has done a great job of providing me with a stable platform for saving, and sharing, my bookmarks. However, despite all of the pretty tags below, I can’t help but thing that it’s still a pathetically small amount of websites. It makes me feel ashamed to call myself the “tech savvy educator”, and makes me wonder if perhaps I might change the site name to the “learning to live with it educator”. I’m not sure how snappy that title is though.
If there’s one thing you’d be ashamed to admit publicly about your use of technology, I dare you to share it today, and link it to this blog post. There’s safety in numbers, right? If not, at least enjoy my Diigo tag cloud. It’s grown a bit since I last posted my tag cloud back in November of last year.
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I too am a technology instructor at the elementary level. I rely on my ikeepbookmarks.org account to navigate the web with my students. Your post has made me nervous, as I do not have this backed up. What would you suggest? Do you recall there being something in Interent Explorer’s favorites that would save favorites a few layers into the page? Would you recommend this?
I’m not sure what you could do to export your bookmarks as ikeepbookmarks looks like a pretty simplistic site (I couldn’t find any RSS feeds).
You could always use WebWhacker (http://www.bluesquirrel.com/products/webwhacker/) and download complete hardcopies of the pages, or try saving the individual HTML files with the need for WebWhacker.
I trust Diigo because it’s so large, but more importantly because it has an export feature. I periodically export my bookmarks to my desktop then back them up with the rest of my data.
If you want to be really paranoid, here’s what I have going on. Delicious is mirrored to http://pinboard.in/ automatically. Then the RSS feed from Delicious is also fed into a wordpress blog using feedwordpress. I now have three backups on three different servers and occasionally do a manual dl from Delicious as well. Viva paranoia.
My shameful admission – I once reformatted my hard drive with all the baby pictures from two children on it and did not have a back up. It took 8 or so hours and an expensive program or two to recover them. It was an unpleasant lesson and yet- my backup process is still entirely erratic and lacking in consistency. My bookmarks are far safer than things that actually matter.
I like pinboard’s description; social bookmarking for the introvert. I think that’s how I used to keep my bookmarks, on my desktop completely disorganized in Firefox.
More importantly though, you are probably one of the most paranoid people I know. 3 different backups is impressive, including a downloaded “hard copy”, wow! There’s a teacher here in my building that backups all of his Macs at home with Time Capsule, then mirrors the time capsule backups on a RAID 1 array to two separate drives, thus producing 4 copies of the data in total.
I trust my Time Capsule at home, and that’s about it, obviously someone who has not learned from the errors of trusting web 2.0 sites. One of these days I’ll give up entirely and just rely my Diigo groups to feed me what I need.
I don’t have any other real “shameful” moments other than the Ma.gnolia blow up, but that wasn’t my fault. I trust your wife gave you quite the hard time for the baby photos.