Pathfinding Your Digital Destiny
On the surface, computers are the answer to many of our dreams. Technology is more affordable, portable, and available than at any time in the past. In our hands we can carry the details of our lives, and even our finances. But the price of convenience is abundance, and in many ways we have too much of a good thing. With the swipe of a finger we can create dozens of images, videos, and messages. But we have become more and more removed from the heart of our digital inspiration. This has made us more dependent on technology, and more helpless when something goes wrong and we can’t find, understand, or retrieve the digital things we care about.
This book explains strategies for capturing, organizing, and archiving personal digital data. It will explain how to manage personal data and why it requires patience, attention, and continual maintenance, not unlike that of a garden. But the rewards are worth it. By adopting proven file organizational strategies and effective methods for scanning, recording, editing, and saving digital files.
Most of us have computers we don’t know we have. Devices in our homes, cars, and purses are really computers in disguise. A smartphone, for example, is really a computer without a mouse and keyboard. An e-reader is really just a computer that has been optimized for reading text. All of our disguised computers are great until we realize we have created monstrous numbers of photos, videos, text messages, and email that are easily lost, and often confusing to save or organize for future reference.
Many people have resorted to “piling”, which simply means that rather than keeping track of the media and files they have created, they rely on the vast storage capacity of modern hard drives to bulk dump our files. This seems to work well until we one day discover that we have amassed tens of thousands of images that are so vast in number that we just let them stay in the wild and fill more and more disk space. When the pile gets deep enough there may never be time to properly organize the files so they can be accessed and found again at a future date. Furthermore, if our solution is to just purchase fleets of hard drives, we are just ignoring the fact that most of the files will likely be lost, or never seen again. This trend does not bode well for preserving our life experiences.
In the early days of personal computing it was much easier to manage one’s own personal information because technology and storage were much more precious and there was no internet with cloud storage to really mix things up. In fact, in the early years of personal computing there was no email and computer files had to be managed manually by storing them on individual floppy disks. There were advantages to having those technology limitations. We had to think more carefully about when we snapped a photo, recorded a video, or dubbed a copy of something for someone because it was much more laborious and time-consuming. Duplicating photos required a trip to a drug store or a photo business. Copying a one hour video required at least one more hour per copy. In the early technology days we were much more aware of what we had and how we managed it.
Computers were much more primitive and simple, but we adapted to the limitations and were used to file names having no more than 8 characters. With more restricted file names we had to give much more thought into what a file named “HL121581.DOC”, for example, contained. I can remember clearly what the naming convention was. The letters “HL” represented a holiday letter, written on December 15, 1981. Managing file name limitations forced a personal kind of innovation and users of computers stepped up and became experts at understanding their family file name scheme for their personal computer.
It seems almost absurd nowadays to think about having to abbreviate such a basic file name so it could be stored and retrieved on a computer, moreover, writing a letter to my mother (why not email?). But the advantage of having such a cryptic filename was how invested I had to be in the naming process itself, and the extra thought I needed to put into attending to the file itself. On a modern computer we can name a file anything we like, but if we don’t remember the name of the file or where we stored it there are numerous tools to help with that.
So what can you do about it? Start by being more in touch with the digital content you are creating. This book will help you learn techniques to help you better manage and organize your digital life, and be more of an active participant in the collection, filing, and archiving of your personal and most important memories.
Most of us have welcomed technological advancements with open arms and we mostly buy into the illusion that someone else should keep our files for us in a cloud, and we don’t really need to organize photos or videos because our computer operating systems have their own tools for that, so they might have us think that we don’t need to be involved in more than the memories themselves. Unfortunately, this is simply not true. What easily happens is that we use our technology to continue to amass more and more photos, videos, text messages, and email, then we run into real problems when our devices fill up and we need to put those files somewhere else.
Digital Dangers
More than at any time in our history, humans are reliant on technology. We literally spend hours of time working with “files” that aren’t really there. In other words, the files mean nothing if there is no computer to display them. They are completely dependent on the technology in order to be accessible and meaningful to us, once put into the digital realm.
If you are a bricklayer, for example, you can spend a day placing bricks on a wall, and at the end of the day you have a wall of bricks that anyone can see, and anyone can feel as a tangible wall. You can spend the same day scanning pictures, writing email, editing photos and videos, and if something goes wrong with your computer you could conceivably have nothing at the end of the day but a broken computer, and depending on what caused the computer to stop working, you might never be able to access or retrieve all of your digital files.
Problems with Clouds
Cloud storage is a wonderful service to keep a copy of files you want to share or store to have an additional copy. Never use cloud storage by itself as a backup. Even though it is extremely reliable you can still inadvertently overwrite files and lose information. The cloud is not enough. You also need extra offline backups.
If your cloud account gets compromised you can be the victim of a cryptolocker attack, where someone charges you to regain access to files that have been encrypted.
Also, cloud backup agents usually just make a copy of the files you already have on your computer. If you need more storage it will cost more and you may not need all of the files you are backing up to the cloud to be stored online. A NAS is a better option, as long as it is also backed up.
What You Need
A willingness to accept the reality that it is a huge responsibility to archive and maintain your files. To be pleased with the results you will need to invest time, money, and mental effort. If you have been interested enough in the concept of digital archiving and preservation and read this far, you probably have what it takes to get yourself equipped for the tasks you will need to complete.
Equipment
You need a reliable computer. If your computer is old, say more than 5 years old, it can still be reliable if it has a newer disk drive. You do not want to embark on a serious project without having a good way to store your work. If you have an older computer you can store files on a new external drive, or better still see if you can purchase a new computer that has a lot of life in it for the job.
Upgrading an old hard drive with a new solid state drive will make your old computer feel much newer than it is, and in the end, the storage is what matters most. The rest of the computer can melt down, but the storage drives are what hold the data. In most cases, when a logic board or other component fails on a computer, thus rendering it useless, the storage drive is left functional, and, can be connected to another computer to retrieve the data.
- At least two external storage drives. One drive will be a backup drive for the first. The drives should be large enough that they can hold a backup of the computer.
- Consider a backup drive for the computer and two external drives for data.
- A Home Network attached storage (NAS) device. This can be as simple as a raspberry Pi with an external drive connected.