 Hey guys, welcome back to Daniel's Tech World on YouTube, on Medium, as we're about to see, and now it's also on DanielRosal.tech. So if you go onto my GitHub account, what I'm going to show you in today's video is I have this repository here called Clydebackup Approaches, and the purpose of this, it's a little bit of an exhaustive effort, but basically, and I'm just going to call up my master backup strategy too, because it kind of relates to that. Master backup strategy, I made a video about this a few days ago. Essentially, I am documenting, because I've never really documented any of this before, and it's good for my own use, because the thing about backups is you tend to forget about them, unless it's something running automatically, and some of these guys, if you look at my main backup strategy schematic here, let me just open the image. Some elements of this do run automatically, such as, for example, the time shift is an incremental, or is it differential? No, it's incremental. That runs itself automatically, the clonezilla does not, so I actually have in this master backup strategy repository, I believe I have a little timeline for myself, in fact. Scripts, backup calendar, another markdown file. I don't need to work on these tables, but basically I have a Google calendar where I do things like take the clonezilla manually, and you don't really want to be in that situation, the elements of v1.3 I want to improve would be stuff like taking this clonezilla image, which is very important, because it's more reliable than time shift automatically. The Clydeberry offsite backup to v2 can run automatically, so you want to put yourself in that position. Unfortunately, where this kind of falls down at the moment is all these manual guys, so I'm also into taking Clyde backups, and I've distinguished here, as nobody has really done, this is my terminology here, about major and minor Clyde backups. I can probably think of some better word for that. What I mean here is you have stuff like your Google Drive, and your Dropbox, and P-Cloud, in other words, the big chunks of data, your big repositories of data living in the cloud. You could actually put this YouTube video, so as I'm recording, let me just bring over my screen recorder, I'm now creating data. It is, as you can see, file size here, almost 10 megabytes, and I'm now creating data that I do not want to entrust only to YouTube, because what happens if YouTube vanishes, you might wonder, and the question to be to be answered here is how can I protect, how can I do in a way that is compliant with the 321 principle of backups, which calls for, I thought I had it here, having an additional two backup copies of all pieces of data on two different storage media, one of which is off-site, so for that video file, I will need to have it on a second cloud repository, and I will need to have it on-site, and if we take the example of my YouTube video, so this is currently, now it's on my desktop, it's about to go up to YouTube, which is a cloud, I'm going to delete the file from my desktop once it does, and I will want to be copying it onto two different clouds, so how will that happen? What will happen is that it'll take a Google take-out sometime over the next six months, I'll include YouTube in that take-out, I will push that up to B2 on an AWS EC2 instance, that'll be cloud to cloud, it's a bit messy, there are G Suite 2 S3 programs, but they don't do, usually they focus on files and contacts and stuff like that, so this is like my own custom backup, you could say that I run on EC2, getting all the G Suite stuff across onto B2 by back delays, and that gives me one cloud backup, and then finally once a year, you can see this arrow here, I will pull everything, and so then at that point, my YouTube video, now let's be realistic and say that probably there is no danger to that YouTube video being lost, so this is a six months process that it's going to go up to B2 after about six months, and probably the next day I'll run a sync of all my B2 buckets down onto my network attached storage device, my Synology, and that's reasonably quick, uploading stuff from my local network to the cloud is a nightmare, it's not really possible, it's too slow, and at that point my YouTube video will be backed up, so getting back to, this is the point of the cloud backup approach, that's why I introduced it, and unfortunately for stuff like Medium, which falls into what I call the minor guys, I do this manually, so I've, in this other GitHub repository cloud backup approaches, I have been diligently, as diligently as possible documenting all these different services, so I mentioned Google G Suite here, Google Takeouts, Automated Export Engine, and I'm starting with a small one, which is Medium, and Medium to the best of my knowledge, there's no real way to do this, you know, if there was it's always worth searching, but this wouldn't be particularly common that people would want to be doing this, I'm not surprised that there isn't something like a script for it, you'll find this is not talking about how to back up Medium, it's just a Medium article about backups, so basically for Medium, I've outlined the process here, I'm just going to show you quickly, we'll go through this one to demonstrate both how to do this and the process, so basically you go into Medium and you, in the settings menu, there is an export functionality here, now to save a bit of time, I've gone through this ahead of time, you click on download zip file and then you receive an email, I'm just going to drag over this from the other monitor here, Medium download request and you get a little, just to confirm, this comes after a few minutes and as you can see here, download archive, so you'll click on that and you'll download the archive, it's a zip archive, so just quickly unzip that and this is what you get, so I always say that it's worse, don't assume when a data provider like Medium says they allow you to back up your stuff, don't take them at face value, investigate what's in the backup, so you know what data is protected and what's not protected and Medium is a good case and point because after looking into this archive, I saw that there are things missing, let's say, so you can see just judging by the folders as there's a little HTML file here and actually they tell you what they're giving you, so let me just, let me just get a little guest window open here, it's already there, so this is what is the readme file, here's your archive, they tell you what each folder contains, so the block one contains blocked users and not blocking anyone on Medium, bookmark posts, claps, highlights, interests, your IP connection history, the posts you've written, your profile, blah blah blah, so let's just look, let's just limit ourselves to a couple here, let us do claps, this is interesting, so this basically as you can see is a simple HTML file, now it's claps you've received and claps you've given, so let me just look at this Linux overview for technical writers and you can see the number of claps, so this is evidently a clap that I have given, I am an ER physician, this guy had COVID-19, so I clapped for this guy, I know I clapped because it's not something I wrote and you can see the article, that's what the link is there, I'm trying to see if there are people who clapped me and I know I have received claps, so that's the first thing to note about this, yeah these are all other people's articles, so you're looking, the backup here is my claps specifically and that's why it's important because if you look at claps here they just say posts, or they do say posts you've clapped for, so what's missing here is people that have clapped for you, so as I said if you really think through what you're getting you'll notice that there are things that are not being backed up and in such a case this is one of the disadvantages of software as a service that you know you're entrusting your data to a client provider and what they choose to give you in their backup and what they choose not to give you, it's kind of up to them essentially, so let's just jump to the key thing here which is the posts folder, so let us go back a bit and just click on posts and now we see the whole shebang of HTML files of all the posts that I've written so starting from the very first one I wrote about setting up a virtual number now we can see that we are it's giving you a HTML file and it has images right so you can think that's nice so you've backed up I mean if you're in the business of backing up Medium your concern is backing up your content basically the stuff you've written so that's good and it's nice that you get all the posts out so easily but have a look at this if I open up the image this is just one of the images for my first article here look at what's in the Chrome Omnibox it is CDN images so basically the HTML files contain links to images but those images are in the Medium CDN and nowhere in this archive let's go back to the archive nowhere is are there images here bookmarks I'm just gonna go through real quick highlights signal through the whole thing interest IP connection history main bit of archive the post publications you're following people you're following session history topics I'm following users I'm following just check out this yeah lovely has all the individual people that I am following I'm not sure if it has followers but so basically it does not have the images so the takeaway from this is that when you create stuff on medium.com post history you can back up your post but that backup will not contain the images so you're not protected against losing your images now of course you could go through let's go through medium backup let's go through posts how to set up a virtual number you could you know go to the various images and save these into your medium backup and say my images for instance posts for instance and virtual numbers but this is an awful lot of work and save that and you know add them yourself to the backup but that's not really practical if you're backing up something with like I have 100 posts in a medium if you've got more than that I'm guessing there is a script that could programmatically do this that could parse through a HTML file follow all the image links download those and put them into a folder I'm not currently at the point where I want to do that because what I do is for this very reason I literally will copy all my medium posts as PDFs and backup those to my own system so that the images are safe that's actually a word press a word press blog so I just copy stuff Eric medium that's really important to know that if you are let's say a frequent contributor to medium medium is a substantial party of your livelihood you're in the medium partner program it's really really important to know and this is true by the way on the 16th of June tech moves very quickly and that there is a good chance that by the time you're watching this video they will be including images in their data export but just important to note that at the present time if you are backing up stuff medium that you're not you're not getting the images so then just to finish up the backup strategy what I would do is take this folder the medium backup folder and I just basically put that up to cloud storage B2 using a program called filezilla and just put that up and then add that to my local local NAS as well and it's safe and it's in two places and that basically gives me the confidence that I need to know that everything if I'm contributing a lot of good content to medium working very hard in those articles I want to make sure that everything is is backed up essentially so thank you guys for watching any questions or comments or queries or anything of that nature my personal website is here DanielRosal.co.al and you can reach me through that contact form thanks for watching