Preservation of correspondence

[David Cantrell]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 10:33:16AM -0800, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 5 Feb 2007 at 10:46, David Cantrell wrote:
> > Surely the big "problem" is that people don't think keeping copies of
> > all the letters they write to their mum is worth bothering with.  And
> > they are entirely correct.
> Perhaps, but you're also assuming that one's judgement of things 
> important is exactly correct.

It's my data, so of course my judgment is correct :-)

> When one migrates hard disk data, the tendency that I've witnessed is 
> for users to make decisions about what to transfer.

Sure.  But even so, keeping all your electronic data is a darned sight
easier than keeping a musty pile of paper.  Just this last weekend I
went through a large pile of paper deciding what to keep and what to
shred.  If that data had been on disk I'd just have dumped it into
folders named YYYYMM and forgotten about it.

>                                        For some reason, the current 
> trend is to wipe or destroy hard disks rather than to remove them 
> from equipment and encourage the owner to put them in a safe place.

I realise that we are a special case on this 'ere mailing list, but even
I have disks that I can no longer read, partly because the last drive I
had for them is now buggered, partly because the disks themselves are
failing, partly because I've got nothing with which to decode the
filesystems.  Frankly, from a data retention point of view, keeping the
old disks is the worst thing you can do.  MUCH better to transfer the data
to a disk that works reliably, that will be regularly backed up, and so
on.  But even then, my letters to my mother are not important enough to
spend the slightest amount of energy on keeping.  If I do keep them,
it's only because finding and deleting them in the 'stuff-from-old-PC'
directory is too much like hard work.

-- 
David Cantrell | Cake Smuggler Extraordinaire

  While researching this email, I was forced to carry out some
  investigative work which unfortunately involved a bucket of
  puppies and a belt sander
    -- after JoeB, in the Monastery