Category: Preservation & Archiving
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1.7 Terabytes richer, 12,000 Songs Poorer
Two weeks ago I discovered that a 400 gig hard drive crashed. Completely. Total data loss. I did not lose a lot of data, and almost all my personal data and important docs are safe, but I’m sure I lost several things I can’t remember. More importantly, my complete mp3 collection from 2001 is down…
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Backing up Important documents for emergencies
Mike Panic on how to create a disaster-recovery/data backup usb drive of important documents. (Lifehacker has a more thorough but less helpful article on the same subject). Yesterday, I discovered three crazy things: my will was not in my safe (I had forgotten to leave it there) on my will a typo had indicated the…
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Welcome to 1922! (FAQ)
(These FAQ are related to the Welcome to 1922! series I wrote for teleread. They list and describe some notable literary and artistic works produced between the years 1923 and 1931). I am not a lawyer and am not giving advice. I am merely sharing what I think to be accurate information at the time.…
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Tips on Saving & Protecting Your Digital Media
About a year ago I did research into buying a media safe. There are really only two media safes/vaults priced for consumers (i.e., under $2000). Here they are. One costs $150; another costs $260. Spending money on a media safe seems extravagant, but we are collecting more kinds of media these days, and it’s unclear…
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Brilliant Backup Strategy
From a slashdot post. 1. Buy 2 identically-sized USB hard drives. 2. Write a script to backup your server onto one of them. 3. After one week, unplug the USB drive, bring it to work, and put it inside a personal cabinet. 4. Connect Drive 2 to the server. Let the script run normally on…
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Tips for Scanning Old Photos
I need to scan lots of old family photos. Here are some handy articles about how to scan photos for archiving. Kimberly Powell writes a detailed guide on about.com. Tips for Scanning & Restoring Another excellent piece by Ralph G. McKnight about photo archiving for long periods of time (150 years, etc) Workflow on photo…
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CD’s and Preservations
Myth of the 100 Year CD. Also, NIST guide to preserving cd’s.
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Friendly URL’s
Interesting piece on how to make more friendly URL’s by Waferbaby. The article is slightly dated; she writes, Why? Why should you go ahead and change a perfectly happy link to one that points to a directory (virtual or otherwise)?… EXPANDABILITY. What if you, or the company you work for, decide to upgrade (or simply…
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Media Vaults
Yesterday at Walmart I remembered that I should look for a “fireproof safe” or something that can protect my media content in my own apartment. They cost about 100-150$. Then I came across this great post on the alt.firefighters google newsgroup explaining the difference between fireproof safes and “media vaults” which is really what I…
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Simple OCR
After successfully installing my USB 2.0 Canon scanner, I discovered that the included OCR really sucked. So I tried instead TOCR, a nonfree ($40) package that worked extremely well. The included OCR had almost everything (zones, spellchecker, etc), but it just gave lousy results. Now if only there was a linux/open-source version, I’d be happy.…
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E(x)Literature Conference
In my previous post I mentioned James Boyle. Boyle gave a fantastic address, “The Opposite of Property,” at the 2003 e(x)literature conference . (Hear the MP3). BTW, this was the first conference I experienced remotely. I downloaded all the mp3’s and listened to 2 days of discussions about digital archiving and the sorry state of…
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DVD’s for Backup?
In a Slashdot story comparing DVD writers, I find about a DVD Help Site