Long Term Storage

In my garage I have a filing cabinet with one drawer containing all the important papers from my undergraduate courses.  In the second drawer I have everything from graduate school.  These are all papers and they are approaching twenty years of age.  I don’t think anyone will ever care to look at them.  It’s just that they took so much of my time to create.  I can’t bear to throw them away.  I am certain no one will ever digitize them.

According to this article, a famous person like John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath, has thousands of pages that will never be digitized.  Steinbeck’s work isn’t the only thing lacking digital preservation.  Of the 132 million objects held in the Library of Congress, only 10% will probably ever be digitized.

For the most part I am ahead of the game.  All the important papers that I wrote in college are in digital format.  We had a mini-mainframe with an ASCII text editor.  All my papers fit on one (state of the art at the time) 3.5 inch floppy.  I still have that floppy.  I have copied it over to a CD for long term storage.

I went to graduate school immediately after undergrad.  It was during this time that I really learned to use a PC to publish.  All my writing was done using WordPerfect 4.  I used Ventura Publisher for all my publications and CorelDraw 2 (that’s right… TWO) for all the graphics.  I also started to back everything up to a Colorado 120 MB tape drive.  I still have all those tapes too.  In the box with the tapes I kept an external drive with an eight bit card.  Hopefully, if I ever want to retrieve any of that information, I will have a computer with an eight bit slot. 

That equipment brought me up to the age web publishing.  Since about 1995 I have had access to a CD burner.  All of my archives have been to optical disks.  Now I have thousands of CDs and DVDs from weekly backups.  Last week’s backup filled ten DVDs.

Over the weekend I was talking to my wife about video of the kids.  We have about 100 VHS tapes that we would like to keep, but don’t want to bother with digitizing.  I think my dad bought a VHS to DVD recorder last year.  I could use that to get all those tapes into digital format.  They would take up a lot less space and I wouldn’t be stuck with a VHS player for the rest of my life.

I try to keep my digital archives in a format that is useful to me as time goes on.  For instance, I have used Eudora for my email since 1992.  I have fifteen years of email that I can search fairly easily.  Just last weekend I needed a username and password that was emailed to me several years ago (I didn’t know what year).  I found the message from March of 2004 in about a minute.

Backups are not only important for the occasional hard drive crash.  They are also important for long-term storage of information.  Keeping all these things organized is important.  I keep a database that has a list of all the archives I have.  I number all my disks and record the disk number with the contents of the disk in the database.  Every time I burn a new archive set, the first thing on the disk is the database of all the previous archives.  So I can pull out last week’s archive and get a list of all my archived disks with their contents.  I keep all the disks in binders.  I use a Sharpie to write the disk number range on the spine of each binder.  That makes it easy to find old information.

In fifty years it will be interesting to see how much of this information I can still access.  As long as I have a DVD drive, I will be safe.  I suppose the last DVD I burn will have to go into a box with an external DVD drive.