I just read this BBC article about how data on optical discs doesn't last nearly as long as one might think (or hope), even irrespective of brand name. A friend of mine (who I trust quite blindly when it comes to topics like this) had told me a long while ago that DVDs don't last especially long and that hard drives are much better for storing one's data. Partially because of this and partially because it's just way easier, basically all of my data (excluding the obscene amounts of anime I amassed from high school through second year) lives on a couple of hard drives and my computers themselves.
Lately I've been thinking about this data of mine, and I've had this nagging inclination to buy another hard drive or two – or even one of those cute little home servers they're selling these days. In any case, this particular article, which in my RSS feed had the title "Lost memories", made me (good, impressionable reader that I am) think about how many photos and videos and other records of various things that I've experienced I've collected over the years. And it kind of hit me, how incredibly sad I'd be if I lost them somehow.
It's kind of odd, considering its increasing ubiquity, how fragile data is now. How instantly huge amounts of it can be lost. I think about the photo albums my mom has from when my brother and I were younger, or even from when she herself was my age (and younger), and... well, an album is the kind of thing you can hold on to for your whole life. I once put a great deal of thought and time and care into putting together a photo scrapbook for a friend who moved away. As much as I'd poured into it at the time, and as much as I'd hoped they would really, really like it, I realize now just how much something like that would mean to me to receive myself. How much it would mean to me years later, to have memories and messages from friends with whom I'd spent some amazing times, preserved in a single book that I could one day show to my kids. (Not that they'd be the least bit interested.)
I don't know where I'm going with this. Now (in addition to buying more data storage) I feel like making some kind of album of my own, to keep in physical book form. But... at the same time, part of me feels kind of strange about photos and other mementos. I'm not sure to what extent I really feel this way, but I have this notion that the things that really count shouldn't require any kind of physical reminders; that the most important things are the ones that shape you as a person – that change the way you see the world and what you do in it. Those kinds of things you carry with you, memories or no memories.
That said, I admit I am a much more sentimental person than most people would probably expect, and ("should"s or "shouldn't"s aside) I can't help but hold on to the physical things that mean something to me.
Yeah, I've definitely lost a lot of data over the past several years since I've reformatted my computer / gotten a new operating system / gotten a new computer entirely. Some random stuff keeps making it through (documents from grade five seem to fare better than average) but there's always some stuff that gets shoved onto removable memory and eventually lost.
ReplyDeleteDespite the amount of personal data I routinely lose, I think the biggest wake up call for me in terms of data loss was when the hard drive for my work computer died during my 3rd work term. That computer was a server hosting the company's source code and bug-tracker. The source code was eventually recovered from tape (tape!) at an excruciatingly slow rate; the bugtracker, containing years of documentation, was never recovered.
There's a lot to be said for physical notebooks. Like your scrapbooks, it's comforting for me to get ideas onto a medium that will last as a physical artifact on its own. On the other hand, those Acer servers are very cool.