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Opinion
Are You Drowning in Data?
3/8/2007
Wayback Machine saved the day.On the more personal scale of finding or forever losing things, have you ever experienced a complete hard drive crash, due to which you lost all of your data? It's happened to me three or four times, a couple of times before I had quality backup available. Each time, for the first moments and hours, it felt like a major catastrophe. Then, a few weeks later, things were rolling along fine with no apparent long-term impact from the data loss.
I've had the same experience with accidental loss of e-mail archives as well. I have never deliberately erased from storage a single non-spam e-mail message. By all rights, I should have several million stored messages to tap into. But it seems that, like their clunky and slow search capacities, e-mail clients in general assume that the user is going to delete, delete, delete. Just try collecting 50,000 messages in a single folder in Thunderbird and see what happens!
A data time machine
But, you know, experience has taught me that these kinds of losses are generally a blip in the overall scheme of things. We all manage to ensure that the really important things we need professionally are backed up and stored. I am still waiting, however, for the implementation of user-friendly, fully-functional eportfolios. Not that the work done by the ePortfolio Consortium folks isn't good. It is. But I'm approaching 60 years of age, and it doesn't seem likely that I'll ever benefit from such a thing. (I hope those words come back to haunt me some day.) But surely someone will offer a comprehensive, guaranteed, automatic, never-filled, user-friendly virtual storage that just collects and collects and collects your stuff and, over time converts it into modern, usable formats, right?
Oh, wait, check out the new Mac OS X feature coming along this spring, the "Time Machine."
More important to me than sometimes losing data is finding things when I need them and not wasting time putting things away. Back about the same time that I was delighting in my first 20 MB hard drive, I had an epiphany about filing digital things away. I learned about the Command-F function. I went in days from being a complete geek about files, filing things away, hierarchical file structures, and the like, to complete relaxation.
If you saw my laptop's desktop, you might, as has happened many times, gasp in shock. At various points in time I'll have enough icons on there that it would take 10 times as much screen space as I have to display them all. My filing system is mostly geared toward taking everything left on my desktop and putting it into a folder dated the day on which I did so. In fact, I will do so later today. Everything on my desktop right now will soon be in a folder called "Desktop 030707," and experience shows me that I will not have a single problem getting to something I need.
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