6 Feb
2007
6 Feb
'07
3:09 a.m.
On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 10:33:16AM -0800, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 5 Feb 2007 at 10:46, David Cantrell wrote:
It's my data, so of course my judgment is correct :-)
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. 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