Get your life organized 2: Back it up!
How much are your music, pictures and files worth to you?
File formats come and go. Harddrives does not last as long as we want to. New software means new formats. Formats that can be unreadable if they don’t get big enough. Are you sure that you still can open your old Ms Works 3.0-documents or your Kodak Photo CD’s…
15 years ago i had an Atari 1040. I used it to write essays and other schoolwork. This data will only be readable with that old Atari-software that I used to create it with. Since the disks are formatted with some old file-system I will need an Atari (or some compatible OS) to be able to get the files. Kind of tricky!
Some formats will live longer than others. If you have Word Documents, Mp3 files, Wav and PDF-files, they will probably be readable in the future (but we don’t know how long). If you have documents made by software that is not so common, I recommend you to keep the program or convert the data to a more common format.
Wired have written an article about this subject. It is available here.
Ok, so now we have gone through the file formats… But the format does not matter if you loose the file, right? Do you backup your data? I would recommend the following:
- Use Dropbox or some other file sharing for the files you use daily. (And that is not too private to share on internet servers in “the cloud”). If your harddrives will fail they will be easily restore
- Keep your important files such as photos and music on at least 2 physical disks. The propability that both will break at the same time is not that high. That will keep you safe.
- Backup your burned DVD’s and CD’s at least every fifth year. Actually one DVD of mine broke in just 3 years without using it.
- Place a harddrive at another place (a relative or a friend) to prevent data loss caused by theft or fire.
I have spent a big portion of my vacation backing up my CD archive to FLAC (lossless audio files). The music archive will be stored on 2 harddrives.
So… If you, like me, don’t know what to do during your vacation: Back it up!
Does anybody know which type of video recordsdata are supported? I keep in mind the Intuition only could dl 3gp using opera mini. I downloaded the twist ap, perhaps that is the issue? How can I watch movies from sites other than youtube? Which file types? Often I am given the choice of 3gp or mpeg4. Can’t get either to work. Thanks on your time! Rattling I wish I used to be eligible for the improve to EVO!
htc hero
26 Jul 10 at 03:50