Your Disintegrating Digital Past

jesus wept don't tell me that right before i start using an online backup service ffs, i'm paranoid enough as it is

brb gonna print several hundred thousand images on professional grade archival paper

Yeah, thankfully I've at least had the foresight to mostly remain a luddite wrt writing. A quality I frequently curse when I go back to transcribe stuff for the sake of editing material digitally, but I can live with it.

i keep meaning to put together some photo books from this immense trove of digital daughterphotos just so that after the apocalypse we'll be able to look at them by the light of tracer fire streaking across our burned-out roof

we did this recently thru a site called lalalab, pretty pleased with the results.

I got really aware that I had no tangible records of my son's early years, so I started taking film pictures of him and making albums. Which is the faff it always was, but is satisfying and good.

Now that photo book printing services are getting insanely cheap I think I'm going to start making books. It's startling how cheap that market has become

I also weirdly-but-happily printed out a lot of personal emails when personal emails were first becoming a thing, looking askance at this odd 'internet' doodad and assuming it might just be a passing fad.

yeah, i made a really nice, affordable hardback collection of photos from our wedding and honeymoon a few years ago, so there's no excuse for me not to do it other than laziness really xp

everything is impermanent, we will ultimately lose everything, including our memories

i make copious backups of the stuff that's important to me. i accept that despite my best efforts i will still, eventually, lose it all. i try to enjoy what i have while i have it.

Rule one of life is always keep an online backup, fucking hell if I lost what's on my laptop without that it would be the last 20 years wiped.

The first 20 years, otoh, I kept boxes of mostly scraps of paper, some of them with dates, I am trying to sort / index them all for a thing, but it's really difficult as things in there have a tendency to really set me off (most recently a note left by a girl I spent 24/7 with for a couple of months in 2002 then never saw again)

I left boxes of stuff with people when I left the UK (also in 2002) - some survived the whole time in my mum's loft (through 3 house moves!) only to be killed by damp and mould in my garage last winter. Some (for example 95% of my LPs) were lost by careless friends who I (idiotically) trusted to keep things for decades.

This is almost the exact opposite for me. I have under 30 photos of myself during the 90s (ages 17-27). My parents probably have a few more but I wasn't big on photos. I definitely wish I had more photos of me and my friends back then as I have almost none.

From 1999 on when I started dating my wife, I have loads of photos because she loves taking photos - physical albums from 2000-2009 or so, then backed up digital photos to present.

worst archive = rotting self-burned CDs of videos, may as well bin them

Part of what prompts my ponderances: while one quarter of my family tree has been recorded in fine detail going back to the early 18th Century, I know essentially nothing about the other 3/4 beyond the generations with whom I have interacted personally. It's just so goddamn weird that so much of my ancestral past is just a blur, and it's weird to think about how much more common a phenomenon that's likely to be the longer we're reliant upon our Blackberries and our Zunes.

My parents have both done the ancestry thing, half of my mum's family are missing from history because of what happened to all the Irish records.

I'm pro-entropy tbh.

Phenomena like this certainly discourage me from fighting too hard against it.

I back up stuff endlessly, so I'm well covered; what will happen is that I'll die and leave behind thousands of CDs never burned and photographs never printed. The one bad experience I had was many years ago, when I opened up Outlook one day and it reached into my main e-mail account and automatically moved everything over (I remember not knowing what was going on until it was too late). Everything stayed there for a few years, but I lost 10 years' worth of e-mail when that computer died (why I back everything up now).

I still have text files, images and MP3s from the 90s on an external drive after a dozen or so migrations since. Proud digital hoarder tbh regardless of whether there is ever any use for any of it ever again.

I just recently happened upon a DVD-R containing all of my essays etc from college. It evoked mixed feelings of 'oh wow can't believe I still have all this stuff' and 'aw man this is precisely the opposite of the digital record I wish I still had of my college years'.

i'm glad to be a digital hoarder but mostly because it's what saves me from being an analog hoarder, that shit is scary to me

when I was at sixth form I wrote a lot on microsoft works. I still have the files, but the only way to open them is to run a windows 95 emulator with a copy of the software, and even then the formatting is fucked.

Sad lol, yes. Love to think of the various design and digital animation files I created in programs that no longer exist.

before we moved house last year and lost track of it there was a zip disk in our kitchen drawer containing music notation files my wife wrote at university which lived there for 12 years and which she'd long since been unable to access because who the fuck has a zip drive post-mid-2000s

I still have a folder named "zipdisk" which contains a bunch of stuff I put on said format - my Dad had a zip drive, I was allowed to borrow it but could only afford 1 disk of my very own - in the mid/late 90s and have copied between several PCs since. it has some very bad music and very bad "art" and very bad unfinished games I made aged 15-18, plus a small selection of other people's music (in .mod & other tracker formats) that I particularly loved at the time, and from time to time I fish it out in a fit of nostalgia

(most of the "other people's music" is still freely available on the internet, but still missing some things I fondly remember from the 90s; I sometimes wish I'd kept more but disk space was expensive then, and you can never guess what's actually going to become obscure and what isn't, never mind what you'll suddenly remember nostalgically one drunken evening 25 years later)

other things I know I "kept" but I am very bad at organising my digital life so everything is just a jumble of files within many other jumbles of files. There's a particular hard disk with some student-era stuff which may still be bundled up somewhere inside boxes of junk in my wardrobe, if it would even still be readable; other disks have been haphazardly copied from PC to PC and ended up in directories with stupid names like C:\spacecadet\stuff\backups\2007pc\files\backups\2003pc\seagate_60gb\copy2 etc, but good luck finding anything

photos would be a particular problem if I ever felt the need to look for them - I have no kids but yes, one day my loved ones will no longer be here and I will want to see photos and this will cause me pain - because in the past I copied them off the SD card mainly to free up card space. So I just have a bunch of "photos" folders in different places with different incomplete overlapping vintages of unweeded mostly-junk photos, and some eras have probably just... disappeared. Now I don't really need the space either so don't copy them often and I'm sure that will be bad in its way too.

then there are the blogs and email accounts which seemed like they'd be around forever and I never consciously decided not to log in again, I just didn't, and they probably disappeared at least a decade ago

given the chaos of photos and nth-generation copies buried many poorly-named folders deep, I'd love to agree with rushomancy

i'm glad to be a digital hoarder but mostly because it's what saves me from being an analog hoarder

but tbh my physical space is just as haphazardly piled high with ancient junk mixed with forgotten treasures and trashy nostalgia bombs and I'm just as terrible at organising or getting rid of physical stuff - perhaps you're right that it would be a lot worse without the digital hoarding, though, but that's too scary to contemplate

yep to all of that re how haphazardly my stuff has been thrown from place to place, nested lumps of pics within folders by month and place and drive and device

hate to say it but google photos has been a bit of use to me in starting to build one useful archive of it all tbh

the details of my life are quite inconsequential

I keep lists of all my favorite artists so if my HD screws up I can search all the stuff again. Not perfect but that is the measures I'm comfortable with.

my film polls stills are wrecked bc of photobucket, which i won't be paying for.

ILX's Top 100 Films of the 2000s, screencaps version

hate to say it but google photos has been a bit of use to me in starting to build one useful archive of it all tbh

Done this myself. Pretty handy.

I had a sudden memory the other day of being in a place in a European city. Could not for the life of me work out where it might have been. It was a time when I had a very basic camera phone and took perhaps a handful of photos the whole time. I've tried streetview and doing a CSI on the one picture I took of a funnily-named cafe but I don't even know if that was the same city I'm thinking of.
These days I'd have way more of a digital record I could check against. I'm more distraught that whole chunks of my memory are disintegrating tho. Anyone else get a very random, vivid, long-forgotten memory pop into their head as you're falling asleep?

I still have my emails from 1997 or so onwards.