Tom Says: Code something crazy every day you feel like it!
I think people my age and younger have it pretty hard these days. Think about it: we're growing up with digital music, digital photos, digital documents, and digital everything else, and no clear way of keeping it all forever. CD-Rs have unpredictable lifetimes based on their storage conditions, and DVD-Rs are worse. Only hard drives seem to consistently last for long periods of time and are relatively recoverable in case of failure, whereas CDs and DVDs are pretty much gone if they get scratched.
I'm considering what to do with my oldest files. They're like baby photos in that they don't seem to have much value when I think about it, but they're irreplaceable and they're my past. I'd like to always have them around, but not with the rest of my files. I back up my actively used files to an external hard drive quite often because I'm afraid of how easily I could lose data in an accident involving my laptop. Backing up gigabytes of old data (even with efficient algorithms like rsync) slows this process down a lot.
It seems like the best solution for me is to keep such old data on hard drives in storage (like a safety deposit box, or with my mom), refreshing the data every few decades or so. It's strange to think in such a long time frame, but it seems reasonable given the life-span of such disks.
Posted Dec 23, 2007, in the late, late night.