So… I guess preservation is important. Personal preservation though? Well, I personally think I’m wasting my time for reasons I’m not quite certain of. But when asked to pick out what I would preserve, I have to answer: I already have.
I figured instead of going through a way of how to preserve forever, I’d start with what I’ve already learned a lot of the do’s and don’t's in digital preservation. Then I can tell you all about my newest plan to keep my personal information always updated.
I’m a packrat sort of person. Its inherited. My house is filled with old pictures of people my grandfather couldn’t even tell you who they were. Lots of old documents from way-too-long ago fill even more boxes.
In my own closet though, I have one box near and dear to me. My journals. I’ve kept journals since I was 9. Some are about my life, but most entries are actually short stories, prose, and poetry that was inspired by events in my life. Its better than a normal journal for me.
When I got my first laptop at 11, I started to type them all out. I went digital and never looked back. The first time I ran into a problem was when my old iBook died and I had to upgrade to a gateway. Yes, a spiffy new computer with a whole new OS. All my .cwk Appleworks files were jumbled code. Its when I first started to really dig into how a computer formatted documents and how to keep that from happening again.
I switched to text files. Plain and simple .txt. Its the easiest cross-platform file format that was good for absolutely nothing but old fashioned text. It was so simple, so easy, so… easily destroyed. A corrupted BIOS ended the life of my computer and all my hard work was ruined. It hurt, it killed, I was ready to kill. I ended up finding a way to get most all the files back with the help of a friend and a drive reader, but even my text file data had been corrupted a bit. It sucked.
After that, I decided the computer was not my friend. It was an enemy that I had to fight against. I started a constant backup scheme, keeping everything on external harddrives set up to update every week, ‘cloud’ storage to keep things accessible from anywhere, but… for the important things, I went back to pen and paper.
Yes, I gave up. Data is just so fragile, like crystal glass. No matter how much you wrap it up in tissue paper and cloth, no matter how many packing peanuts you add to the box, it can still get damaged. Sometimes, having a printed copy of the important stuff, nicely put into a page protector in a binder is the only way to really keep the stuff that matters preserved. Sure, one day it’ll be gone, but at least I won’t be the one crying over ‘lost precious information’.
