Ni Hao.

Firstly – digital photos from UK trip WILL be posted this weekend. Apologies I’ve been so remiss.

Now, today’s point. I’ve been worrying recently about digital photos. Specifically the fact the fact that I now have 8.74 gigabytes of them (4,782 files distributed through a hierarchy of 137 folders) and they exist on my laptop hard disk and are backed up on to a not very structured set of CDs and DVDs that are all in the house or office but I couldn’t put my hand on them straight away. Laptop Hard Disks fail (regularly from our experience at work) and more than half the time my laptop is in the same location as many of the archive CDs anyway (and my house has some very strange electric wiring). So I’d been worrying about this for some time and was then particularly disheartened when the external USB Hard Disk we have in the office failed as this was the solution I was leaning towards.

Then this morning I happened across an article which doesn’t really propose the solution but covers the problems I had considered (primarily data loss) and some I hadn’t really considered (obsolescence, potential role of third parties, etc.).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/21/forgetting_digital_memories/

Now I’m not sufficiently pessimistic to think that in any kind of time frame I’m concerned with we’ll arrive at the point where we lack access to a device capable of displaying jpeg images, but CDs seems possible (I no longer have easy access to record player or a VHS player). A colleague was telling me the other day that the recommended option for building the servers we buy is now to boot from a USB stick and they supply stick images for this purpose. The servers in question don’t have CD drives and certainly don’t have floppy drives (that’s three generations of standard boot media in my short career).

So how much time/effort/money to spend on the ‘data integrity’ of my personal data, how many layers of resilience? The sheer volume of storing it once is mind boggling never mind two or three times. I took over 5 gigabytes of digital photos last year. Assume that remained flat that’s 250 gigabytes of photos alone over the next 50 years. What about blog entries, emails, letters, etc? Is P2P the solution or third party data banks – I’m not sure but I am sure that I, like most people could be doing rather better just with the technology I have available.