January 21, 2005
Computers Department
Digital Immortality
Glenn Reynolds says:
Digital images are potentially immortal, so long as they get recopied from time to time onto fresh media, but reality being what it is, hardcopy in a shoebox is probably likely to outlast things that require actual human effort.
What effort? Hard drive technology improves so fast that every time I get a new computer I just copy the entire contents of my previous computer into an archive folder in one little corner of the new one and then grab the files as I need them. Everything is there, downloaded drivers, images of the install CDs for all my software, all my ripped music, and everything I ever downloaded. Of course, one of the things in the archive folder is a copy of the archive from an even older computer. It's like those Russian dolls.
I'm up to 200 Gigabytes, and I imagine that will tuck nicely into one folder on the terabyte drive that is sure to come with my next computer.
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