Over the past month or so I have been cleaning up my apartment and tossing out old stuff I don’t want or need anymore. It is part of what I call my digital summer cleaning. I have taken old school and medical records I got from my dad that he kept when I was a kid and scanned them into PDF files. I am amazed at how many report cards I found. I scanned a ton of old letters I kept (for some reason that I cannot recall other than I am a pack rat) from friends over the past 15 years. Many of the letters I received I had written on the computer so I actually have a complete back and forth correspondence. it is kind of cool reading some of them. Once everything was scanned into the computer I shredded the old paper documents to save space. My wall unit has so much more room now!
On top of that I cleaned up a lot of the files I had on my computer. When trying to open some old letters I sent back in the mid 90’s I realized that the latest version of Word (2008 on the Mac or 2007 on Windows) wont open old Office formats. I had read about that in the past but never ran into the issue much. It was a real pain. That got me onto another kick I have had, move all my old documents to modern (ISO standards when possible) file formats. I already have several PFS Professional Write files from early middle and HS from my Commodore 64 that I still have but cannot open. I didn’t want to be screwed with other files. To solve that problem I built a Windows XP Virtual Machine (well used a copy of one I setup with SYSPREP) and installed an old Copy of Office 2000 on it. I then opened up as many old file format items I could find and printed them as PDF’s. For the past few years that has been my format of choice for archiving stuff. For things I want to be able to read/write in the future I have been saving stuff in the new Office XML format. I am not a fan of it, but I still don’t really use Open Office that much.
Additional things I have been doing is taking old CD’s & DVD’s I have used to make periodic backups of my data and ripping them back into my computer as ISO files. I am putting them all on one hard drive. Drives are cheap. I have been buying Western Digital My Passport portable 320gb drives for like $80. Over time the DVD’s start to rot. About 5 years ago I had already consolidated my old CD archives onto two DVD’s. Now I am putting all the DVD ISO’s onto one drive. I will still make DVD backups but I want a copy on a hard drive for safe keeping. Since I am so paranoid about data retention I also am continuing my habit of copying most of my data (well the important stuff) onto a hard drive at the end of each year. I am not sure if i am going to recycle the drive i use each year. So far I have, but since drives are getting cheap I might just start accumulating old archives on drives.
All of this clean up and organization would not have been possible without my Fujitsu Scansnap 300M scanner for my Mac, Adobe Acrobat 9 for Mac, Cute PDF writter for Windows, VMware Fusion, my brother P-Touch label maker, and my paper shredder (with cross-weave). Save and secure digital storage brought to me by my Drobo Firewire 800!