I awoke in the wee hours of Monday morning last week. I do that a lot. Often it’s because I have to pee, but sometimes it’s my waking from a nightmare. The week prior, I had a real doozy that had a werewolf that sprang in front of me and grew so large, it blocked out all traces of light. I woke up screaming. Becca, understandably concerned, asked if I was OK. I was fine because I was awake. That meant the monster was gone.

This past dream was not so bad. I had escaped my abductors in SF and was sneaking around some dream version of Oakland that’s a lot nicer than Oakland really is. I wasn’t sure about the people I escaped from. Maybe they wanted to own a hostage the same way one might want to own a dog. There was certainly nothing to indicate they wanted to vivisect me or use my fingers and toes as a pizza topping. I was happy to be rid of them, but never felt any real fear. I woke up relaxed.

I checked my phone and it was just after three in the morning. The VM where I host my blog had one job scheduled to run at two on Monday and another at three. The first job dumped the contents of the blog’s database into a file in a backup directory I had created. The second job uploaded that file to a remote storage account I recently set up.

For the briefest of moments, I felt like a grownup. I behaved prudently. Poison Spur is the only endeavor I’ve pursued with anything approaching a sustained effort and now it had a means of disaster recovery. Never mind giant werewolves and pizza chefs who wield bloody tin snips. Losing this blog would be a real fucking nightmare.

It happened once before. Roughly ten years ago, there was a disk crash and I had no recent backup. Sifting through both Google and disk cache, I was able to piece most of it back together. It was a painful experience and I should have learned my lesson right then. Instead, I pushed my luck for another decade.

So what changed? What motivated me to do something smart after all these years? The answer is what made my feeling of maturity so fleeting.

Back in January, I upgraded my DSL to a high-speed fiber-optic thingamabob. The new modem had a router built in, which meant I had to learn how to configure the thing. You know the five-second rule when food hits the floor. I have a five-minute one when it comes to figuring out a technical task. Of course, figuring out technical things is what I do for a living so I make an exception whenever money is involved. Otherwise, I say fuck it and either play a game or catch up on what’s happening in the world of porn.

The five minutes elapsed so I declared partial victory. There was Wi-Fi access for our phones and desktops, and my desktop computer could access the internet via an ethernet cable to the modem/router/whateveryoucallit. What I didn’t have was the means for a device to access the desktop through the Wi-Fi.

I bought my desktop in 2010, which makes it about as modern as a horse-drawn carriage in as far as computers go. Lately, it had pretty much been relegated to a backup device for my phone. I would launch my rsync app, tap a few buttons, and my pics and whatnot would get backed up. I didn’t even have to get out of bed.

Those days were gone and I realized it was all for the best. If my shit is worth anything at all (a debatable point, granted), shouldn’t it be recoverable even if there’s a burglary or a fire? I did a bit of googling and decided to go with IDrive (not an Apple product, note uppercase “I” #fuckthecult) because there’s no limit on number of devices and it works easily with Linux.

For my $69/year, I get 1 TB in cloud storage. I don’t process that figure well. It’s bigger than I can mentally size in anything but abstract terms, yet it’s too small to be infinite. That left me with the perplexing task of deciding what to back up.

My music collection was a no brainer. The same went for my writing projects. Conversely, there were some things I had no desire at all to back up: downloaded installer files, CPAN modules, and the like.

The jury is still out on porn. There are no legal reasons not to. Even if is law enforcement subpoenaed my encryption key from IDrive or the company gave it up just to be dicks, there is not much that can be done to me. Child porn ain’t my thing and the mere possession of other kind of obscene material is not prosecutable. I think snuff porn might be another criminal no-no, but I doubt I have any of that either. I’ll need to check my archives.

Legal issues aside, I don’t see much of a point. Most of that crap lives in folders that have been opened in years because I have no interest now. My old friend, the late great Ray McKelvey of the band Stevie Stiletto once said in a song, “I’m sitting on the toilet thinking about a girl I used to know. Like a pornographic movie, she was only good the first time.” There is a lot of wisdom in those words, largely because of the near-universal truth of their foundation. Porn serves a purpose and then we move on. There are exceptions of course. I have a friend who automated his Usenet porn downloads back in the 90s and lovingly catalogued them into burned CDs with titles like “Redheads Vol. 4,” but his level of devotion is a rare thing indeed. I’d say doubly so now that we live in an era when there is convenient access to live, streaming whatever the hell you’re into.

So porn, like anything, will have to be considered on a case-by-case basis and because storage devices will someday fail, I have the power to decide what ultimately lives or dies. I’ll be like God with my own personal rapture roster. I may make a few mistakes along the way, but there is one I do know: Most stuff, whether it is on a planet or a hard drive, is not worth saving.