Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

[mel]

OK... one thing everyone have in common here is that in one way or another, we are all computer users. Most of us have at least one computer, many of us have many computers.

If you have been using computers for years, you have either owned many or gone through several of them, accumulating over time many, many files.

I've owned a computer since 1988 and am the owner of probably more than a million computer files by now... everything from saved emails, letters, writing documents, photos, music and other digital files including in many cases programs that probably don't run on the newest machines you own.

My question is how long do you hold on to your files, where do you keep them and do you find the older files useful? Can you even open old files on the computer you own today? Do you keep multiple archived copies of older files?

The reason why I ask is that over time many of us have become the equivalent of "digital pack rats". An article on the internet recently addresses this phenomena:

Personal computers -- our jukeboxes, photo labs, accountants and film studios -- are becoming the proverbial junk drawer, scattered with scads of must-have information. Sister devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players and digital video recorders overflow with often barely a bite of spare storage.

You can read the entire article at this link.

Comments anyone?

[Miulang]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

Boy, is that ever the truth! Just on my computer at work, I have something like 2,500 read emails and about 30 unread (just from this morning alone)! I tend to use my computer as my digital filing cabinet . I know that you're supposed to put the emails into folders, etc. and be tidy about it, but hell, if I do that, I would never be able to find anything! So I use "find" instead and can usually get to the email I need.

If there was something I really really needed to keep, I suppose I would burn a copy into a CD. But then there's that issue of where to keep that danged thing.

Miulang

[helen]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

Non-spam email I keep as well as the digital photos I have taken, of course I already archived photos from cameras I don't use any more to CD.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

All of my stored digital files are on CD-rom that gets saved again every other month. CD's ar so cheap now it's possible. Right now I have three of those 50-pack CD-rom containers full of files. One day I'll compile all of that into a handful of DVD-Rom discs or one Blu-Ray disc (whenever they decide on a standard format)

Just when you think you've compiled everything you pick up a scanner or software to convert analog music (cassettes, LP's) into MP3. I have boxes of cassettes and records that need to be transferred as well as paper documents and photos that need scanning. Thank God I'm retired and have the time now.

[mel]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

The key into being a successful digital pack rat is to 1. back-up all of your data, even archive disks for time to time, and 2. have a system where the items are easy to find when you need it. I am good at #1 but bad at #2.

I have all kinds of stuff backed up to CDs, zip discs, even older Syquest and floppy discs too. I label most of the discs with a general descriptive label, but no where can I list a thousand files on the disc without actually having to open a disc (the case for CDs) and playing it in the computer. It can be frustrating when I need to retreive a file that I archived say 2 years ago that is no longer on my main computer hard drive.

Anyone got a problem or a good system where this stuff can be easily retrieved?

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

I have found that storing stuff on CDs just doesn't work for me. They get lost, or I lose track of what's on which disk, or it's just too much hassle to go get the disk when I want something.

I keep all my files on my hard disk, and regularly upgrade and move my data to larger and larger disks. My most recent upgrade was to a 250 GB Maxtor, and it's about half full already.

[pzarquon]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

Anyone use a backup solution like Norton Ghost? I know there's a difference between backing up your PC hard drive as is, and archiving vast amounts of data (documents, photos) without the OS, but I always wondered if those utilities could facilitate both models.

I don't mind backing up to CDs, but when I had a Mac, there was an archival utility that came with my Syquest 40MB cartridge drive that backed up documents, but also built a master database of document names and dates so that I could tell on which cartridge I'd saved which file. Of course, back then, I never could imagine filling up 40MB of space! To think now I generate single files that big...

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

My question is how long do you hold on to your files, where do you keep them and do you find the older files useful? Can you even open old files on the computer you own today? Do you keep multiple archived copies of older files?

Are old files useful? It depends on what kind they are.

I have text files from 20 years ago that I created on a university Unix system, and they're still useful today. Or at least, they're still readable. Whether anyone, myself included, wants to read my old college homework, is another question. I suspect that the files that are the most "useful" are my old email correspondences with friends, which are valuable to me for sentimental reasons.

Of course, there are formatting issues. My first PC word processor was something called PFS:Write, which has long since disappeared. I still have a few documents I created in that program kicking around, but I think the format is so obsolete that I'd have to extract text from the raw file before I could read it.

Software is another story; I get cold sweats every time I have to try and run an old DOS program on my WinXP box.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

it's all in how you designate your files and folders.

Everything that's updated and on CD-rom is on my external hard drive. When I need to back up my files from my external HD I simply burn new discs with every thing in my "G-Drive contents" Sub Folder in My Computer.

I keep two previously archived cd-rom copies of all my backed up files in separate places. One is kept in a water-tight container that floats and the other is kept off site also in water tight containers. It's a good idea to date your CD-Roms with a copy date. The older CD-roms are destroyed.

But if anything else at least keep all data files on an external hard drive, just in case your computer crashes. When I go on the Internet, I keep my external hard drive turned off to keep hackers from getting into my personal stuff. An external Hard drive also allows you to move files from one computer to another quickly and easily.

[EastCoastTropics]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

My question is how long do you hold on to your files, where do you keep them and do you find the older files useful? Can you even open old files on the computer you own today? Comments anyone?

I hold onto files until I gotta format my hard drive! Nah, only joke! This last time I had to format my hard drive I lost everything business-related! All the graphics I had for business cards, labels, tags, not to mention customer invoices etc! (fortunately, I also kept books of my customer invoices) And no, I nevah back up my files. Now I back up all my files and keep everything on CD's. I have CD's with stuffs on 'em that's 5 years old and I'll never use again. Just haven't had the time to delete them all.

[adrian]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

Since my computer is one year old, I don't have any "old" files on it.

I usually either zip them up and put them on a CD or leave them on the computer. But the problem with CDs, is that if you don't label them correctly, when you go through them later, you have to put them into your cd drive to check what's on them.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

word of advice...Sharpie!!

[helen]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

And put on the CD the date you burn it and the speed it was writen on (like 24x or 48x or 12x).

I think what Mel means by old files, are files that were originally on another computer before the one you are using now and got transferred to the current computer.

[Konaguy]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

On my new computer I have a DVD+R/RW drive. I do my backups on DVD+R. So I don't have to use multiple CD +R's

[mel]

Re: Are You a Digital Pack Rat?

All my backup and archived files are burned to CDs, older files are still on zip discs, syquests and floppies. Some have been upgraded to CDs... I still keep the original media around though. Don't know why. I keep on making backups of the backups too, espeically those files that are still somewhat active on my computer.... they get burned to CD....

The files can be so overwhelming though. For example I have to save all of my MP3 files by themselves spread over several CDs.... ditto with all of my photo files taken with digital cameras... and several hundred more files that were scanned from older pictures over the years.... I also save files by client projects, personal projects, writings, emails, etc.... over the years, the various medias do tend to pile up.

I think even if I got DVD backup, the DVDs themselves would also pile up, though hopefully slower than the CD proliferation.

The one thing I am leary of is that we keep all of our files in one place like say a DVD or CD... and if that goes bad, you stand to lose multi-megabytes worth of stuff.... which only prompts me to make even more backups because of those kinds of fears.

Still, over the years I have found that some of the older media hold up quite well. All of my Syquest discs (the old 45MB variety) are more than 10 years old, and still play well if I connect the syquest drive to the computer. Of course I have long ago backed most of those files to zip and then later to CDs.

The problem is still finding the stuff after you archive them. I mean I just have photo CDs that are labeled basically by the month of the year from which the photos are taken.

Still have to shove the CD into the computer to see exactly what is on them as others have also mentioned.

Like it or not, I am a digital pack rat.