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I have a tendency to keep paper backups of important stuff. I have a long, dramatic, love-hate relationship with technology. My computers regularly crash on me, and it doesn't matter if I built it, my computer-geek friends built it, or it's store-bought. If something *can* go wrong, it will.
I still have a harddrive with half my photography locked in it that I can no longer access because the drive failed.
So I keep things on paper. I make notes, I have a paper calendar, I have a paper phone book.
I began my Media Reflections posts and have notes everywhere. I have a whole folder on my computer of topics I want to write about and haven't gotten around to yet.
But one day I noticed that a particular TV show that I watch gives me a topic pretty much ever episode. So I went back to the beginning and watched every episode, in order, and took notes in a notebook and never got around to making a digital copy because I put more faith in the analog versions to not fail.
And I've lost that notebook.
Argh!
Now I have to go through and watch the whole series, again, just for the purpose of taking notes. And I know if I save them only to a computer file, my external drive will choose that time to finally fail before I've gotten a backup system in place and I'll lose it there too.
I still have a harddrive with half my photography locked in it that I can no longer access because the drive failed.
So I keep things on paper. I make notes, I have a paper calendar, I have a paper phone book.
I began my Media Reflections posts and have notes everywhere. I have a whole folder on my computer of topics I want to write about and haven't gotten around to yet.
But one day I noticed that a particular TV show that I watch gives me a topic pretty much ever episode. So I went back to the beginning and watched every episode, in order, and took notes in a notebook and never got around to making a digital copy because I put more faith in the analog versions to not fail.
And I've lost that notebook.
Argh!
Now I have to go through and watch the whole series, again, just for the purpose of taking notes. And I know if I save them only to a computer file, my external drive will choose that time to finally fail before I've gotten a backup system in place and I'll lose it there too.
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Date: 8/5/08 12:32 am (UTC)From:I've been using the same computer as my primary computer for over four years now. I backed it up onto an internal disk. I backed it up onto an external disk. I backed up the backups. I archived dead files, backed up the archive, and backed up the back up archives.
One week ago, I got a new computer and transferred over all the files, new, old, and dead. New computer went wonky, seriously, and the only way to get it back up and running was to erase-and-initialize.
And only then did I discover that only one set of back-ups was still readable anywhere else, and it did not contain any of the archives of dead files, or archive back-ups. 15 years' worth of tax returns, photographs, old stories, correspondence, writings, stories, movies, etc., no longer exist.
And paper copies never existed for any of them; I don't have several cubic yards of storage space and how the hell do you print out movies anyway?