Should It Stay or Should It Go?

Too Much

I like getting a new phone but not for the reason you think. I love a clean slate. Most people wring hands over transferring their photo library, but I have a plan. I go through all my images and delete everything I'm not interested in keeping. I am ruthless. Whatever is left I send to have an inexpensive photobook made. Then I delete all the digital files. Some people are shocked by this. But I also know that as long as those images exist in the digital realm on my phone – I will never look at them again. But I have flipped through my photobooks.

I started down this archiving rabbit hole with this highly recommended podcast from Tim Harford:

Cautionary Tales – Laser Versus Parchment: Doomsday for the Disc

William the Conqueror undertook a remarkably modern project. In 1086, he began compiling and storing a detailed record of his realm: where everyone lived, what they did and where they came from. 90…

Tim Harford

William the Conqueror undertook a remarkably modern project. In 1086, he began compiling and storing a detailed record of his realm: where everyone lived, what they did and where they came from.

900 years later, the BBC began its own Domesday project, sending school children out to conduct a community survey and collect facts about Britain. But just a few years later, that interactive digital database was totally unreadable, the information lost.

The BBC project was on LaserDisc; the census from 1086 on parchment. Just considering the advertising industry, I've seen a ton of storage formats and devices come and go:
Beta tapes
VHS tapes
DVDs/CDs
SyQuest drives
Zip drives
USB drives (on their way out if you ask me)

Pretty much everything has moved to an online or cloud space. This online space seems to take care of issues of formats and physical devices. But will we still be able to access this information in 20 years? Anything I ever put on a SyQuest is trash today. Early on, you had to be careful what you chose to archive – I cannot overstate how time consuming it was, and you were limited by your storage capacity. But now it's so cheap and easy, we store everything – even things we'll never want or use again.

Not Enough

The flip side is not storing things we aren't thinking about needing now, but will want in the future. Excellent article below from Scope of Work:

On Documentation

Here’s a partial list of surprising things about human technology: * Throughout history, when someone has learned something that they really wanted to pass on to future generations, more often than not they would write it down on paper – a material that is highly susceptible to damage due to water,

Scope of WorkSpencer Wright

Throughout history, when someone has learned something that they really wanted to pass on to future generations, more often than not they would write it down on paper – a material that is highly susceptible to damage due to water, fire, and the abrupt grabbing motions that seem to be hard-wired into toddlers everywhere.

As tenuous as that sounds, it’s perhaps even more terrifying to imagine how much of human knowledge exists only within the heads of living people – and what would happen if a generation of working-age adults were suddenly wiped out. Even if good documentation existed, could a younger generation keep everything running smoothly without the [rolls eyes] accumulated wisdom of their elders?

How do we decide the things that are important to keep? How should we store them?

With photos, I have an easy time letting go. But I will admit to struggling with my massive font folder. I tried not copying it over to a newer computer. But every now and again I find myself needing something from the file. I also feel like it's a nostalgic archive of fonts dating from the beginning of my career that I can't let go of, even though a lot of the file formats render them useless.