We recently got rid of a bunch of books. One of them was “The World of Donald Evans.” My parents gave it to me as a birthday gift, a long time ago. It’s a fascinating look at fictional stamps this artist created before he died at the age of 31.
I realized I had not looked at the book in almost as long as I’ve owned it. So I sold it on Amazon... but not before I took some representative photos of the content. So now I can remember that lovely gift, without my kids having to give it to a charity shop when I die. And having to take the time to do so. If they want to dig through my old hard drives, they can do so. But those will take up the space of just a few shoe boxes. Or by then, a small flash drive. Or a small bit of the cloud. (But I like owning my own data!!)
I’ve written about this before: here and here. But I feel strongly enough about it that I wanted to remind you of this concept.
That is a great idea Paul.
Thanks Jenny!
A friend pointed me to what James Lileks wrote: “If the contents of my disk drives physically manifested themselves in the house, I’d be one of those people you see on those shows about hoarders. Makes you wonder if the hoarders of the futures will be someone who has a box of disk drives. A spare house with a few pieces of furniture, a media wall of course, a replicator in the kitchen – really, an ordinary normal house, no one thought he had problems, but when granddad died we found a shoebox that had ten 20TB drives. In his house! He lived like that! Well, we spent weeks going through those drives. You wouldn’t believe what he scanned and squirreled away. Nowadays we all put everything in the Common Cloud, but he seemed to want to keep things for himself.”
(I love it!!)
Great advice, Paul!
I use a backup/storage device called a Drobo that is (IMHO) the easiest, most efficient way of backing up my work. (I have no affiliation with them)