Fighting Digital Entropy
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Just me on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 7:26 PM
My hard drive almost died last month.
Once I found out the data was safe, I was actually relieved.
My laptop is sporting a brand-new (free! thanks, Apple) hard-drive now, and the old one is stored away, waiting for us to get the data off it at some future point. I’m planning to enlist the help of my geek-proficient brother when he’s home for the holidays.
In the meantime, I’m really enjoying my new hard drive. It’s so pretty!
My computer looks the same from the outside, but when you double-click to open the main drive on the desktop, you can practically hear angels singing. It’s so clean!
Unlike on my old drive, there are no random folders filled with five pictures from Camilla’s second birthday plus a blog post I never edited or published. If you open the photo managing software, you don’t find 4,000 shots that desperately need to be culled (why did I let my teenaged brother use the camera? All those “artsy” shots of the underside of the kitchen table!) and sorted. The desktop itself doesn’t have a folder filled with seventeen public-domain jpgs I thought I could use for future blog articles, then forgot about.
The new hard drive is a thing of beauty and a joy for the time being, because it is organized. Unfortunately, that probably won’t last.
We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about organizing our stuff, the stuff that piles up in the laundry room and the living room and every other room in the house. My dad loved drily quoting the second law of thermodynamics: “Entropy increases.” Anyone who’s ever shared a house with children or roommates knows it’s true, and keeping the entropy of a household in check is vital.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to forget that digital entropy increases too.
I tell myself that someday when my children are grown I’ll have time to keep my folders in order and my digital photos nicely categorized. My essays will be stored in one place, indexed so I can reference them eaily. My desktop won’t be cluttered with random downloads. Most importantly, I’ll do regular back-ups.
But “someday” isn’t really good enough. What if I lose a bunch of priceless photographs because I didn’t back them up? Wouldn’t I be able to write better if I had drafts and ideas well-organized and easy to access? Wouldn’t my life be happier in general if I didn’t have to spend fifteen minutes combing folders for a file I’m sure I have in there somewhere, even though I can’t remember what I called it or where I put it?
Yes!
So: I’m starting clean with this new hard-drive, and I’m determined to be a better fighter of digital entropy. Folders! Back-ups! The works! I’m promising myself.
But I’m curious: are you good at keeping your digital life organized? And if you are, do you have any tips for the rest of us?
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