Easy Way How to Keep Your Digital Memories Safe

Easy Way How to Keep Your Digital Memories Safe

Do you value the digital content you produce? Nearly everyone uses computers to create things, and some do so without thinking about how valuable they might be. Others are aware of its current value but do not give much thought to what it might mean to them in the future, and they are either unaware of or do not believe that all of it could be destroyed in a single day. However, hard drives fail on a regular basis, and the online services that people spend a lot of time using shut down alarmingly frequently, taking the work of millions of people with them. Before it's too late, save your digital memories now.

1. Now, make a quick backup. If nothing else, drag and drop your documents folder onto a cheap USB stick. Later, worry about other things. You should do more, but taking the most important, irreplaceable data from your hard drive and storing it on a secondary medium to prevent hard drive failure, theft, or loss is the most important thing you can do.
2. Choose your values. Consider these concerns for yourself:
3. Would it matter to you if this were deleted tomorrow? The response is, of course, yes, for things like documents and accounts for businesses. Things of this nature ought to be your top priority.
4. Would it matter to you if there was no record of this in ten years? Alternately, if you are old enough to recall events from a decade ago, consider the following: What events from a decade ago do you wish you had a record of today? Even if your cat's picture doesn't really matter to you now, you probably would after your cat died.
5. How easily can this data be changed? Even though it can be a pain to do so, most downloaded movies and MP3s can be replaced, so losing them won't be a big deal. It is difficult to duplicate written documents or take photographs.
6. How well do you know how much something is worth? Our selection of things to back up will be prone to error and probably short-sighted as human beings. Be careful not to back up too much data; Disk space is inexpensive and has a great capacity of 23 cubic inches.
7. Avoid investing both time and data in online services. This does not mean that you should never tweet or post a picture on Facebook; These are fun activities. However, keep in mind that no online service should be regarded as an archive or permanent residence. These services occasionally stop working. In other instances, your account may be suspended or your data may accidentally be lost.
8. Never invest time in a service that does not provide you with an easy means of obtaining your data again. It's probably not a good idea to use it if it doesn't let you download everything as a ZIP file or with automated tools via an API.
9. In the event that a service you use goes down, make sure your email address is up to date. Most likely, they will notify you via email if they do.
10. Keep copies of everything locally. After putting something online, don't delete your local copies unless you are absolutely certain that you will never want to see it again.
11. Be on the lookout for warning signs that the service as a whole or your data is in jeopardy. You should think about moving your data to another location and double-check that you have local copies of your work: undefined or unsustainable business strategy. Enjoy these services, but as with any service, you can't expect them to be available next year.
12. If you experience prolonged downtime or data loss, you should consider whether you want to remain there at all. Fotopic was a great illustration of this; People continued to upload their photos to the website throughout a number of downtimes, at least one of which lasted for an extended period, before it was abruptly shut down in 2011 without prior notice reports that the site's staff has removed accounts. 
13. It is not necessary to discuss whether they might actually have a valid reason for doing so to observe that this occurs quite frequently to individuals who are not expecting it on many of the social networking sites that are prevalent in today's society a service that is bought out by another company with no clear plans for the future. Particularly, avoid talent acquisitions that may abandon the service; If you can read between the lines, the 2012 acquisition of Posterous by Twitter is a great illustration of this.
14. Begin creating backups. Keep in mind that something is preferable to nothing. As with everything else, backups are subject to diminishing returns. The vast majority of likely items lost can be recovered using the cheapest and simplest backup methods. The biggest trap is to make your backup strategy too complicated: The less likely you are to make it if you insist on making it more difficult and costly.
15. People who tell you that you absolutely must go all-out with geographic redundancy probably do more harm than good considering that such things are necessary if you are going to have backups at all, despite the fact that they have good intentions when they aren't showing everyone how awesome they are.
16. Initial level: Place the folder containing your documents on a cheap USB flash drive. This was done in the first step already; if you have not already, do so now. This safeguards your most valuable data from the most vulnerable storage medium.
17. Second stage: Purchase a USB external hard drive and begin copying more of your data to it once you have determined what you value. Make it a habit to do this at least once a week. You'll have more room to play with, so you can put things like your music collection that can be replaced on it. You should also investigate methods for downloading data from online accounts, such as backing up your blog or making use of Facebook's export-to-a-big-ZIP-file feature, so that you can also back up that data.
18. Third grade: Take into consideration a method of automated backup. If you want to, this is worth it, but it takes longer to set up properly; If it does not notify you of media failures, a poorly designed backup will result in the loss of more of your data than a straightforward manual backup.
19. Fourth grade: Geographic redundancy for possessions that cannot be lost. For example, if your house burns down, this takes care of it. The law of diminishing returns is in effect; This is much less likely than a hard drive going bad, and of course, if your house is destroyed, you probably won't be as concerned about your cat pictures as you are about finding a new place to live and starting over.
20. Be careful when using online backup services. They are useful when there is potential geographic redundancy, but you should never rely solely on them as a backup source. Again, never delete anything from your local copy, and never use a service that doesn't give you a simple way to get your data out. "File locker" services are especially bad places to store your data because they can disappear almost immediately and are frequently used for illegal purposes.
21. Keep your mobile devices in mind. Numerous individuals have abandoned or replaced traditional computers. Take backups of your video and photos using your camera phone.
22. You might want to think about licensing your work under a Creative Commons license or giving away a copy that is easy to download so that other people can archive it. If your content is interesting enough, allowing others to copy it will result in a large number of copies being distributed.
23. Content licensed under Creative Commons will be accepted in many places; Any media that you have created yourself will be accepted by Wikimedia Commons, as long as it is at least somewhat educational. Digital artifact collections will also be accepted by the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org/. Think about making a contribution to one of these or another nonprofit project that is similar.
24. Keep an eye on the media in your storage. In the event that one of your backup drives fails, replace it right away. The universe is prone to the most irony; Avoid pushing it. " In the long run, you should move your data off of various types of storage media as they become obsolete and onto newer ones as newer technologies become more mature. For instance, floppy disks were sent to the glue factory a decade ago and are rapidly becoming unreadable. This is the course that writeable CDs and DVDs are taking; Get your data onto hard drives or solid-state media right away if you have backups stored on these.
25. Think about how much of your digital record is other people's data, and maybe keep some of it. Your bookmarks are a good example of this from the past; Maintain a backup of your bookmarks file at the very least. Many of your digital memories will have been created by other people in the age of Facebook; for instance, tweets mentioning you or photos in which you have been tagged. It is permissible to make personal copies of other people's content in many jurisdictions, provided that the copies are solely for personal use.
26. Keep in mind that you can only use your backups if you have software that can read them. The agony of discovering that modern software cannot read their documents has already been felt by many computer users who used computers in the 1980s and 1990s.
27. Software that makes you keep using it should be avoided. A photo manager, for instance, might want to import your photo library but fail to explain how your files are stored or how to get them back. Music download services that allow you to purchase tracks but use copy protection to prevent you from making copies are another example, though they are thankfully rare these days. This is especially true for software that stores backups; A long-term solution is pointless if no other program can read the format in which your files are stored.
28. Be wary of unusual or proprietary file formats. The more general scenario of the preceding: Because they don't want you to be able to read their files using any other software, some vendors don't document their file formats. In the event that your product licenses it, trade a duplicate of your work for some open document design. Use an open-source alternative immediately if your software prevents you from doing so.
29. Choose file formats that are currently supported by open-source software. Even if you're using proprietary software, you'll be able to open it in open-source software long after the vendor of your software stops supporting it because open-source software tends to last longer than closed-source software.

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