Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 5, 2012 Deadline December 2012 Issue You Need Backups: The Benefits of Off-Site Storage Hurricane Sandy reminds us that in a matter of minutes everything in a building can be destroyed. Though we can predict some disasters, others come quickly and without warning. My wife and I have lived in places with earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and blizzards. Those are only some of the natural disasters that can upend lives. And then, there are the unfortunate events beyond nature. When things do go so horribly wrong, they take possessions and memories. Sometimes, the losses include computer hardware and storage media. In a serious disaster, the best place for personal and business data is somewhere far, far away from the event. Yet, most of us don’t have off-site backups of important data. It is time to adopt an off-site backup strategy. Because all storage media fail, my wife and I do all we can to maintain backups of important data. I have th...

8-inch floppy disk drive compared in size to 3.5" floppy disk of 1984 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley June 4, 2012 Deadline July 2012 Issue Data Ghosts of Hardware Past Iomega Zip disks were, depending on your experiences with them, the greatest idea of their time or one of the worst digital storage media ever sold. The Zip disks I own were purchased between 1995 and 2002; until recently, I was unsure why I kept them. As this summer began and I was preparing to teach summer school, my wife stumbled upon a printed version of my website from 1996. There were several pages of text on the topics I would be discussing in class. My wife offered to scan the pages, which was a better option than retyping the content. Then, I remembered we had an old Zip 250 drive and stacks of disks stored in a cardboard box. As readers of this column know, I encourage everyone to make weekly, monthly, and annual backups of their data. I’ve migrated data from one m...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 24, 2011 Deadline March 2011 Issue Archives Aren’t Backups: Storing Data for the Future Do you remember WordStar? Lotus 1-2-3? Harvard Graphics? If you’ve been using computers as long as I have, you created documents, spreadsheets and graphics in too many applications to remember. Yes, I have 25-year-old data. I have copied those files from floppies to Iomega Zip disks , from Zip disks to CDs , and most recently from CDs to a trio of external hard drives. Each time I upgrade computers, I migrate data to whatever happens to be the leading archival format. I migrate data every two to four years. That is important, because media do fail. However, what has enabled me to use old documents is a habit of storing data in two or three formats. In my “Documents” directory, I have created folders named “Archives of…” to store data in neutral formats. Recently, I wanted to use an old image created in a DOS-based application. I tried several applic...