Keep Your Digital Memories Safe

“Google is a library or an archive like a supermarket is a food museum.”

— Jason Scott, digital archivist

Do you value your digital stuff? Nearly everyone is creating things with computers, and some do it without any concern for its value. Others recognize its current value, but think little about what it could mean to them in the future, and either aren't aware or don't think that all of it could be destroyed tomorrow. But hard drives die all the time, and the online services into which people sink their time close with alarming regularity, taking the work of millions of people with it. Preserve your digital memories now, before it's too late.

Steps

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   Make a quick backup now. If nothing else, get a cheap USB stick and drag-and-drop your documents folder onto it. Worry about the other things later. You shoulddo more than this, but it's most important to take the most valuable, irreplaceable information from your hard drive and put it on a second medium to guard against hard drive failure, theft or loss.
   
   Stop reading until you have done this and stop making excuses to not do it.
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   Decide what you value. Some questions to ask yourself are:

   • Would you care if this was deleted tomorrow? For things like business accounts and documents, the answer is of course you would. This kind of thing should be your first priority.
     
   • Would you care if you had no record of this in ten years' time?Alternatively, if you're old enough to remember what happened a decade ago,What happened a decade ago that you wish you had a record of today? Your picture of your cat might not matter too much now, but you would probably think differently after your cat passed away.
     
   • How replaceable is this data? MP3s and movies you have downloaded are generally replaceable (even if it's a pain to do so), so it's not the end of the world if they get lost. Documents you have written or photos you have taken cannot easily be re-created.
     

     
   • How good are you at assessing the value of items? As human beings, our choice of things to back up will be fallible and probably short-sighted. Err on the side of backing up too much stuff; disk space is cheap and 23 cubic inches holds a fantastic amount of data.
     
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   Beware of sinking time, and data, into online services. This isn't to say that youmust never post a picture on Facebook or say anything on Twitter; these things are fun. But remember that no online service should be considered an archive or a permanent home. Sometimes these services go down. Other times, your account there might be suspended or your data lost by accident.

   • Never sink time into any service that doesn't give you an easy way to get your data out again. If it doesn't allow you to download all of your stuff as either a ZIP file or with some automated tools via an API, it's probably a bad idea to use it.
   • Keep a current email address for any services you use in case the service goes down. If they give you any notice, it will likely be via email.
   • Keep local copies of everything. Don't delete your local copies after you've put something online unless you are totally, 100 percent sure that you will never want to see it again.
   • Watch out for signs of impending doom, either for your data or for the service as a whole. These are some of the signs that you should consider moving your data somewhere else and be doubly vigilant of having local copies of your work:
     • Unclear or unsustainable business model. Have fun with these services, but as with any service, don't count on it being around next year.
     • Losing data or extended periods of downtime should make you consider whether you want to continue being there at all. Fotopic was a fine example of this; after suffering several periods of downtime, at least one of them extended, people continued to put their photos on the site before it was shut down, with no notice, in 2011.
     • Reports of deletion of accounts by staff of the site. One does not even need to discuss whether they might actually have a good reason for doing so to note that this happens rather a lot to people who are not expecting it on many of today's social networking sites.
     • A buy-out of the service by another company that has no clear plans for its future. In particular, beware of talent acquisitions which might leave the service orphaned; the 2012 acquisition of Posterous by Twitter is a great example of this, if you're good at reading between the lines.^[2]