FindAllYourStuff, Making your information "Reachable" -- ThinkingOutLoud DonaldNoyes 20070924-20120605
Saving stuff In Places you can find
Put stuff and pointers to all your stuff in organized places:
- Since I have allowed the indexing of the files in my system a couple of years ago, It has become easier for me to uniquely identify and later find a particular item that I may want to access. This I do by using the Search Desktop of my Microsoft Xp Professional. It initially consumed a lot of computer resources, and slowed things down, but when I allowed it to run, it made finding my stuff, even some over 30 years old, possible.
- Present: Involved in backing up to my hard-drive, particularly since I have found the Hard Drive as I use it to be very reliable, and because it allows me to index and reorganize all my stuff, and then to back it up on larger capacity off-line media.
- I use a simple scheme which allows me to associate what Cdrom I have backed up and when I did it:
- An example of a Cd Rom I backed up was one containing WardsWikiPages20030123, it is saved in a sub-directory of CdRoms? called "20070923-22" (which becomes the Cd name and filing position) in an artifact with the name: "Collection.20070923.Cd".
- Future: I'm looking forward toward the 5Tb and larger Usb.Media
Since inexpensive 2.0 Terabyte and larger USB drives now retail under $120, you can now P
utYourLifesWorkOnIt.
PutYourLifeOnIt
- This title makes me think about software for pacemakers, commuter airplanes, air-traffic control, Lasik machines, and armed UAVs. It does not make me think about a repository for every piece of addressable and storable information one encounters in life. Would I be remiss in suggesting a less ambiguous catch-phrase for this concept?
- Anyhow, most people suffer hardware failures and don't do much in the way of backups. I think, for this to work, backups need considerable more automation... ideally with automatic geographic distribution. It isn't as though nearly unlimited storage is expensive nowadays. It's the software and widespread service support that is missing. (Not generally availble for the individual)
Related:
Thank you for these thoughts. I have wrestled with this problem for many years. I now have data on different technologies, such as ZipDisks, which were once used a lot but now clutter up the place. I need to retain old computers in order to be sure to recover the information which I might need sometime... and so it goes on. -- JohnFletcher
I think this is a common problem. I retain old computers as you do, but mainly for different reasons: history and nostalgia. I have only one era left to archive on modern media: my trunk full of old 5 1/4" floppies. There is still some valued stuff there not yet archived. Since my main current computer has no floppy drives, I will have to rely on one of my NstalgicComputer?s to recover this data and then transfer it to modern media (hard drive and Dvds). I will make time to do this later this year.
I have another strategy I use for historic and NostalgicComputer Stuff (MovingDataForward).
See:
CategoryIdeaSpace
Find All Your Stuff