Will all your music, audio books, photos, movies, creative writing, diaries, blogs, email, web pages, business records, and other digital files be usuable and available in fifty years? I have a few files that I first created on my Commodore 64 back in the early 1980s converted to text files and saved in My Documents. I have some digital photos that are over ten years old. I haven’t been very careful with my MP3 files, and have thrown many of them out. I’ve even lost or misplaced some iTunes and Rhapsody songs that I’ve bought. Mostly, my My Documents folder grows and grows, becoming a giant trunk of junk that I move forward with every new computer. I’ve even started backing it up to an external USB drive – but if thieves stole both my computer and external drive it would all be gone. My wife’s computer is just as junky, plus she buys a lot of online games and if her machine died we’d be hurting for a lot of missing serial numbers.
Until we started scanning in old photos and slides I didn’t worry much about protecting my files. Some of the photos we are scanning are from the 1920s. We’re now in the business of protecting family memories that are 85 years old. I’m thinking of converting some of my record and CD collection that goes back to the 1950s. I’ve even been collecting old audio book tapes and converting them to digital to listen to on my iPod. All this stuff may not represent a lot of money, but it does represent a lot of time.
The only solution I’ve imagined so far is to copy files to my work computer. I’ve already started bringing work files home as a precaution. But it’s not very convenient at all.
I bought a program called Second Copy that automatically copies my hard disk files to my external USB drive. It has a FTP function in the new version 7.0 that I’ve been meaning to try. I’ve wondered about setting up a FTP server at work as a target for my home files. I haven’t asked my boss what he thinks of that, but I’m willing to offer setting up a FTP server at home to send my work files to. I need to research finding a secure FTP program that would run in background on my two machines.
This isn’t a solution for most people, although many people do work with computers and it could become a fairly common solution. There are probably all kinds of legal issues to deal with. Another possibility is making reciprocal deals with friends and family. The trouble with that solution is most people don’t have static IP addresses or even computers with unchanging domain names from a DHCP pool. I do know people play online games so there is a solution for computer to computer communication. I’ll have to research that.
I just did a Google search and discovered a company Mozy.com that promises unlimited online backups for $54.95 a year, or $4.95 a month. That may be far more convenient than messing with FTP servers – if I could trust Mozy. What I really want is a data bank – a bank for my data files that is as trustworthy as my regular bank is for money. I think I’ll clean up my My Documents folder and sign up with Mozy. I’m not sure how long it will take to transfer 60 gigabytes to them, or if they are really sincere about promising unlimited storage.
Auxiliary Memory 