In addition to being off social media most of this week due to baby juggling, I’ve also been absent due to computer woes. I’m really not sure how I do it. I go on the same handful of websites every day and I’m not dumb about shady links or other internet pitfalls. AND YET. Every one of my computers inevitably implodes in some new and bizarre way. I’ve gotten pretty good about keeping an external backup as a result, though of course this computer implosion happened right after I copied all of my baby pictures off our camera, before they were also copied to the backup.

So hopefully I can have those files salvaged from the hard drive before it is trashed! I should probably consider cloud storage, but I am so leery of the cloud. Either way my current system isn’t quite cutting it.

My inner archivist has to step in here to say: digital has its benefits (mainly in the quick accessibility and cross-linking of information!) but digital content is pretty boned. If you want to truly save your stuff, you have to print it out. It doesn’t matter how diligently I back up my content during my lifetime. When I die, I can either doom my kids to migrating my photos for the rest of their lives– or I can leave them a few photo albums with the best shots. They can stick those albums in a box and forget about them for decades and lo and behold, the photos will not be corrupted or erased, or incompatible with current viewing technology. We can find texts that are thousands of years old, buried in sand, and still read them. Hard drives won’t be so lucky. Heck, I found a pile of floppy disks the other day. I can still track down a floppy disk drive with USB hookup (for now), but will I have the programs to read fifteen-year-old file formats? Increasingly unlikely.

/end archivist soapbox

Next week: real blog content instead of gripes! Perhaps about books, perhaps about history, perhaps some stupid anecdotes from my youth, perhaps more clever/entertaining gripes, ONLY TIME WILL TELL! I will probably still be sneaking time on my husband’s laptop in between baby feedings, because that is life right now!

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P.S. I’ve got to say, the timing of this computer crash is some sort of cruel message from the universe. I was feeling a little glum because early days with babies mean all of your other hobbies get put on hold until the beast falls into a more reliable schedule and you aren’t as much of a sleep-deprived zombie anymore. And then my computer dies a fiery death, as if to say, “Did you think you would even fit in an hour in the morning? How about NO ACCESS AT ALL??” Like, that is pretty rude. As mentioned, I do have the vast majority of my files on a backup, so I can kludge something together via borrowed laptop. It’s just cruelly symbolic, that’s all.

Anyway, I think I hear sputnik stirring. I must away!