Are your stats backed up? Thankfully, mine were.

This post is may not seem APBA-related but for me, it is. It’s geared for APBA players who like me, store APBA files on their computer. Examples of these can be Excel stat files, backups of APBA BBW files, or for that matter any type of documentation of replays.

This past month, my computer suffered a massive hard drive crash. Among other files, my Excel spreadsheets which contained stats from my ongoing 1966 stats as well as my league stats for my Twin City Thunderchickens were all gone.

In most instances, I would have been panicking. But mostly, I was just mildly annoyed. It was a major inconvenience to have a disk crash and be without my normal computer for a week while it was repaired. But I didn’t give the safety of my important files a second thought.

Why?

Cloud backups

That’s why.

The “cloud” may be a marketing term but does refer to something real. Many of use the cloud or cloud storage without even realizing it. In fact, tech companies like Apple and Microsoft encourage customers to use their branded cloud storage. There are other cloud storage which offer free storage.

In short, my APBA league stats and my 1966 replay stats were synced online. Once I got my replacement computer back, I logged in to my cloud storage account and my files synced up to my new computer.

Which cloud storage?

I am not about to recommend one cloud storage solution over another. Most of the top ones will work just fine.

Some examples:

• Microsoft OneDrive (works best with Windows)
• Apple iCloud (works best with Macs)
• Google Drive
• DropBox

Most of these offer a free amount of data which is sufficient for most of our data. If you wish to add to your quota, you can pay a nominal fee.

Other benefits

Aside from backup recovery, there are more benefits to cloud storage. Most helpful, is file sharing. The Boys of Summer League has been using OneDrive to share league documentation as well as its weekly BBW commissioner file and lineup files. With just one click, I could download the necessary file. I’ve been trying to encourage my Illowa APBA League to use a cloud storage solution to distribute our monthly newsletter.

Versioning is another benefit. Take the above example of sharing newsletters. Say there was a mistake of some sort in the latest newsletter. The commissioner could simply make the change on the uploaded copy and the link would still point to it. There would be no need for sending out multiple versions of documents encouraging confusion as to which one was the correct one.

I was lucky in that I synced my files just before my hard drive crashed. It’s best to make sure that all files that important to you are being synced. One (non-APBA related) file did not get synced and is lost forever and had to get re-created.

Honestly, it wasn’t that I was so happy that everything was backed up. I didn’t give it much thought. At the same time, I have now seen the value of cloud backups first hand!