I was reading this article on our digital (and online) lives slowly leaking away on Robert Scoble's blog. In essence the blog post is about our digital footprints being washed away. In years past we had letters, postcards and photographs to document our journey through life and all things important to us.

For example, I've written a number of times about the letters that I have from good friends, penpals that I had throughout high school and my early undergrad years, postcard and birthday cards, and photos from vacations that I took with my grandparents. Undoubtedly many memories that can be easily quantified and stored. Since 1998, when I started being increasingly digital, I've started moving away from paper, and closer to zeroes and ones.

My first few years on the internet were marked by lots of archiving, downloading of email to simple text, printing out, saving it, just like real letters. In latter years I stopped doing this, just as more and more of my friends started emailing me. I started taking more photos with digital cameras and friends were sending me photos digitally. Heck, even greeting cards came in nice little Flash based packages, which made them a pain to save!

So what happens to all those digital memories? Sure, you can save all those emails, keep them on the hotmail, yahoo or gmail server, and you can even save to PDF on your hard drive. If your hard drive fails, it's still online, and if the online service goes buh-bye, it's still on your hard drive. A few years ago, after my hard drive died on my powerbook, I decided to put all my photos on Flickr. Luckily I had saved most of my photos on discs already. After my most recent hard disk failure (Damn you Western Digital and your MyBook!!!) I have decided to make full use of my iDisk on MobileMe, as well as Microsoft's LiveMesh and SugarSync.

Yes, I still backup to DVD, but given that some of the DVDs that were created on Kristin's iBook and my PowerBook are not legible on the Mac Mini, I kind of wonder if those discs will be legible at all in 10, 20 or even 30 years. Will services like Flickr (where all my photos are stored) be available? Will this blog be available? I suppose the content will be, in some form since I back it up, but will Blogger be around?

I've been considering getting a Drobo, but then again will the file formats be legible? After all, things are susceptible to data rot. While paper-based backups (like photos from when I was a kid, or the aforementioned postcards and birthday cards) are more archival, if there is ever a flood those materials are goners. I do wonder if we are fighting a futile war against the degradation and loss of our data. Do we expect all things to be available - period? Or do we accept that some of our memories, like our twitter streams, will be gone and that's OK? My original blog posts (1998-2004) are gone, since I didn't even consider it a personal log (even though it was) since I never backed up. My high school papers and freshman papers for college are gone due to formats that I can no longer use. The archivist in me says that it would be cool to have all that material, but the pragmatist in me thinks that I would have gotten rid of those papers a long time ago anyway, so does it make a difference that they are locked away in formats that I can't access, or are simply lost?


I guess the answer depends on the individual.

Photo credit:
http://www.lakelandartandframing.ca/