These days people have a lot of themselves in digital form. Backup for a home computer is not too tough these days with cheap external harddrives and easy web services (not that most people do it!) But what about those photos on your camera phone? Your iPod? Or stuff out on the world wide web somewhere? I have a lot of stuff in my Flickr account. There are local backups buried around the house somewhere, but those don’t represent the collections and comments on the site. And with Yahoo’s current up and down troubles it does strike me what a drag it would be if that all just disappeared one day — but how do I back it up? I actually pay for the pro account, so I guess I have some type of service expectation, but if it came down to needing it I don’t expect it is really worth much.
Perhaps another way to look at this is to question what needs preserving? Technology has progressed to where it is possible to record and store a 24 x 7 video stream of your life, including emails, photos, text messages, blog posts, comments on Amazon books, etc — but just because we can, should we? I recently helped my mother clean out an elderly relative’s house — 80 years of stuff (she’s still alive and kicking by the way at 100, but has moved in with her son.) There were some diamonds in the rough, but most of the ephemera ended up in the dumpster. In a rush to save everything do we risk burying the important bits in a sea of castoffs?
This question came up at a recent discussion with some collegues about use of blogs and other technology for classroom support. Once a class is finished what happens to the class blog? In class digital whiteboards — do you archive all the in class notes? Record the clicker responses to in-class quizzes? Do we keep it all forever? Delete it when the students graduate? Drop it at the end of the semester? What about a discussion board, or wiki? Tweets from a twitter experiment? I suggested we not keep it, seeing it as part of a passing conversation, useful during the class but of little use after. The librarian in the group objected, and made a convincing argument for preservation. In another discussion with a peer running a service for some classroom blogs we both admitted that the issue of preservation had not been discussed with faculty — it just hadn’t come up. Recently I received a request for recovery of an experimental digital project from several years ago, and I don’t think I can get it back. Through some clean up after a minor security breach, changes in the server software, and clean-up of old databases I think the files were lost. I’ve got a few more back corners to look in, but am afraid I’ll be eating some major crow in the next week.
But in the end what should be preserved? And as we jump headfirst into the online world are we moving too quickly to properly consider the question?
Yahoo Layoffs Continue, Flickr Loses Top Designer | Epicenter from Wired.com
Yahoo continues to swing the axe through its staff, this time lopping off three members of the highly regarded Flickr.com team, including George Oates who was primarily responsible for for the site’s highly-regarded minimalist design.
Who will Preserve Your Digital Data? – ReadWriteWeb
Almost every piece of information we access today is stored somewhere in digital form–think iPod, YouTube, digital cameras, mobile phones, not to mention our personal and professional information spread across LinkedIn, social networking sites and blogs. It’s difficult to imagine life without digital data in this information age. But who manages it? And, more importantly, who will preserve it?
Communications: Volume 51, Issue 12 , Got data?: a guide …
Tools for surviving a data deluge to ensure your data will be there when you need it.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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