Introduction

You’re doing a lot of work in your courses. Pretty much everything you’re doing at school is digital: you’re writing source code, you’re writing documents, maybe you’re making spreadsheets or taking photos. Losing this data could be catastrophic, especially if you’re in a situation where you couldn’t possibly bail out.

While version control is a tool that you can effectively use as a remote backup, its main purpose is not as a backup of your software. In fact, version control software is downright terrible as a backup strategy for documents that aren’t plain text (like source code or Markdown-formatted documents).

This week we’re going to talk about what a good, automated backup strategy is, the kinds of tools that you can use to do it, and get our machines configured so that we’re able to quickly back up our assignments to aviary.