Wednesday, March 2, 2011

The Day After Data Backup Day

Amy's Genealogy, etc. Blog has a recent post titled, Digital Youth and Digital Preservation that caused me to look at Data Backup Day a little differently this month. It discussed an interesting film at the Library of Congress about youth and digital preservation and got me to thinking about the importance of digitally preserving information belonging to the young adults in our household.

The films refers to youth today as Digital Natives, having grown up in a digital world. Well, the Digital Natives in my household really haven't put much thought into how to digitally preserve and protect their own digital information.

Due to recent circumstances the time is right to approach the Natives about a solution. Younger Child is going to have to send the laptop in for repair. When I asked what information on the computer, if lost, would be devastating, the response was, "My pictures. I like to look back on my pictures." I then asked if there was a copy of those pictures anyplace else. Of course the answer was no. So we set Younger Child upwith an online backup service in the cloud. Younger Child was very open to this, so now it's a done deal.

Older Child recently experienced a broken pipe in her building after the recent freeze, which caused significant flooding. Older Child suddenly has a new appreciation for concepts like insurance and hopefully data backup, which we will be discussing in a few days.

I hope you, and your family, have backed up your data recently!


© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum

3 comments:

  1. Great post, some good things to contemplate here.

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  2. I have a bunch of stuff stuck on my old laptop that I can't get to. It needs to go in for repair and though I did scoop a bunch of stuff off of it before it froze completely I really need to take it in to be fixed.
    Good advice.

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  3. Interesting presentation. One can lose time if one has to start over. And from the youngs point of view is an interesting idea.

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