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Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

I am always amazed at how people do not even think of this excellent use-case (let alone use it). This is something I have always loved in laptops and have used. Besides that card is barely even visible unlike a pen drive or a hard disk. It just stays there subtly.

I was also planning to have a bootable Linux on one of those, but I never got around to actually doing that. Now that my 2012 MBA's flash storage is dead (and here in India either I can't find replacement, or repair shops are asking for half a kidney) I will see if I can actually use a card instead.

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Probably because carrying your backup inside of your device is a horrible way to preserve your media in the event that the device is lost or stolen.

My suggestion was one of the convenient tips of the proverbial iceberg in the world of backups and redundancies. Today, I'd be astonished if one lost their devices and loses any data along with it.

Personally, all my devices are endpoints or tools. For instance, if I lost my phone, it will take me a few hours or a day/two at best to get back to where I was. The same goes for my other devices (desktops, laptops).

In the most critical situation, say, I lost my phone while traveling, but lucky my wife's phone is in-tact, I can pick up hers and go through my contacts (we sync our contacts two ways). I can then login to anything anywhere by getting to her Password Manager, which fortunately has a copy of mine. I might need to ask her to authenticate it for me.

I strongly feel that one should have a pattern and system of redundancies and be independent of the devices one uses. I'm still discovering and learning a lot; not yet the best, but I'm happy I started quite a while back.

No, I won't.

I will still have data on rsync.net, b2, Tarsnap, borgbase, some even in Dropbox. Also, the weekly backup to my external hard disk.

That card is more like regular/scheduled backup sink (encrypted data) like those cloud destinations I mentioned above to help with laptop malfunctioning or just dumping some data on it quickly when I want to take it with me (that's rare though).

Oh good idea! Bootable Linux would be so handy.

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