astonishingly simple cloud back up<\/a> here).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nOkay, So What Does That Have to Do With \u201cDead to Me\u201d?<\/h2>\n There\u2019s kind of a long road ahead, so buckle up.<\/p>\n
For those of you who haven\u2019t seen it, or who binged it so long ago you need a refresher, \u201cDead to Me\u201d follows the story of two friends, Jen (Applegate) and Judy (Cardellini). Jen is a recently widowed mom whose husband Ted had been killed in a hit and run shortly before the show started. Judy is a woman she meets during a group therapy session, who claims to have lost her husband as well.<\/p>\n
Only, as it turns out, Judy didn\u2019t lose her husband. They just split up\u2014after an argument that started when they accidentally struck and killed Jen\u2019s husband.<\/p>\n
Intrigued yet? We\u2019re only on the first episode.<\/p>\n
By the end of the first season, Jen has discovered the truth about Judy (but they\u2019re still friends), Judy is dating a police officer who is investigating the crime she committed, and her ex-husband Steve (James Marsden, playing against his usual type as a jerk) is desperately trying to cover up the crime while avoiding the Greek mafia, who have a contract out on him.<\/p>\n
We cannot stress enough that all of this craziness happens in the first season, which ends with Jen accidentally murdering Steve by\u2014of course\u2014cracking him in the head with a wooden bird, which winds up as a critical plot point.<\/p>\nYou see tchotchke. I see danger.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nFrom there the plot twists around on itself, throwing every curveball imaginable at you from secret twin brothers to money laundering schemes to torrid affairs (and hey, we already mentioned the Greek mafia). But critical to our point is one plot thread that could have been avoided with a proper backup strategy.<\/p>\n
Karen and the\u2026 Let\u2019s Call It 2-1 Strategy<\/h2>\n A minor character in the first few seasons, Karen is a neighbor of Jen\u2019s who\u2026 well, can be kind of a Karen. You know that person in your neighborhood that you suspect reports you to the Homeowner\u2019s Association whenever your grass gets a little too long? That\u2019s her.<\/p>\n
As the neighborhood Karen, she has a natural inclination to keep an eye on things. As such, her house is ringed by security cameras. And as we learned in the season two premiere, one of those cameras just happened to spy Steve on his way to Jen\u2019s house the night he was murdered.<\/p>\n
Plot twist, right?<\/p>\n
Since this is a huge piece of evidence implicating them in the murder they\u2019re actively covering up, Jen and Judy have to ensure that the incriminating footage is destroyed forever. That means deleting the footage, which they discover has been safely stored in the cloud. They first try to convince Jeff, Karen\u2019s ex, to log on and do it (side note: this happens after they discovered he was having an affair with one of Judy\u2019s ex-boyfriends, because this show is bonkers) but unfortunately Karen has changed the password to her cloud storage.<\/p>\n
So they have to sweet-talk their way into Karen\u2019s house (greasing the wheels with her favorite dish\u2014Mexican lasagna with extra raisins) and get her to delete the footage off the cloud. It\u2019s a wonderful moment of female camaraderie as they convince Karen that the data on the cloud represents too many painful memories of her time with her ex. And when Karen finally drags the folder to the trash, we cheer her for finding the strength to move on.<\/p>\nJust a couple of friends, deleting files over coffee.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAnd then, the punchline.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if I ever want to see it again, I have it backed up on my hard drive,\u201d she exclaims, holding up her external drive backup. Jen and Judy manage to steal that, and in doing so get away with their crime scot-free.<\/p>\n
What Should Karen Have Done?<\/h2>\n Look, we get that the show is trying to get us to root for Jen and Judy as our protagonists, but to be honest, murder is one of those things that is a little hard to look past.<\/p>\n
Especially given that the FBI was looking into the crime at that point in the show, what Karen did could legally be considered obstruction of justice. Or at least unintended obstruction of justice, which we\u2019re pretty sure is still a crime. (We on the blog team are definitely not lawyers, though.)<\/p>\n
Had Karen utilized a proper 3-2-1 strategy, she should have had a third copy\u2014the one on her local drive\u2014even after she was tricked into deleting it from the cloud and handing over her external drive. And, if she was using Backblaze<\/a>, she would have been able to access an earlier version of her backup with either our standard 30-day version history or Extended Version History<\/a>. So, she could have pulled a copy even after she deleted it.<\/p>\nThe Moral of the Story Is: 3-2-1 Backups Are Still the Best<\/h2>\n Karen handed over all the incriminating evidence about the murder to the person who committed it. Which, true, made for a happy ending as far as the show is concerned. But for those of us who can\u2019t seem to get 3-2-1 backup strategies out of our head, she committed a serious blunder. A 2-1 backup strategy just won\u2019t cut it.<\/p>\n
And that, folks, is how \u201cDead to Me\u201d reminds us all once again that a 3-2-1 backup strategy is still the best way to keep your data safe and out of the hands of nefarious, if endearing, murderers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s not often you can bring together a hit Netflix TV show and a good backup strategy. Read on to see what Dead to Me taught us about a good 3-2-1 backup strategy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":171,"featured_media":108435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[121,434],"tags":[469],"class_list":["post-108432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-backing-up","category-featured-1","tag-consumerbackup","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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When normal kids were playing outside, he was dismantling the family VCR to figure out how it works. While his writing career has crossed the realms of travel, journalism, and celebrity puff pieces, he remains an amateur tinkerer and complete nerd at heart (in fact, he built the computer upon which he writes). 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![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/pexels-anna-shvets-5257607.jpg\")