Hoarding for History!!!

I am amazed I have never heard of him!

That sort of manic activity reminds me of someone being bipolar and evidently he was prone to depression, at least the reactive kind.

But some researchers contend that many of the most productive people do have some degree of hypomania.

If I kept records like that my relatives might try to lock me up (lol) and all of it would hit the trash at about the time of my demise!

Also the compulsion to write like that is associated with bipolar. Hmmm.

Thanks for the story and the insight! That first link is tremendous!

I save all of my files on digital hard drives, perhaps not all of my emails but Gmail does that nicely for me.

I believe that Ms. Fenner gives good free legal advice above……get rid of….if and when you can, remembering Nixon.

As to worrying about hard drive crashes, remote drive crashes, fires in the house, and the inaccessibility of reading things in the future, I’ve moved all my files into the cloud. If a tornado arrives, I can access everything as soon as I can get back online. This, of course, poses another risk but I’m willing to bet that Google will outlive me.

Why is so hard to understand you have locked in your little head everything that will in fact determine a decision? You need not go to your computer and search e-mails for the supporting info. You will simply say, this is right, or this is wrong. E-mails only provide info that leads to search … or research if you prefer. So ruminate if you will, but realize your brain works without a computer … works very well indeed. Self confidence comes to play. Remember, confidence?

I think data worth keeping follows the 80/20 rule. 80% of information is garbage and 20% is probably worth keeping for posterity or legal reasons. However, this comes down to the question of where to store it, especially in this digital age.

Chrissy pointed out astutely David Pogue’s piece on Data Rot. Digital data has several problems data rot being the major problem with the physical medium, obsolescence and the physical degradation of the medium. The other problem is obsolescence of software to actually read the data from the medium.

There is now a technology that will over come both of the problems of data rot. It was developed by a company in Utah. It is a disc that will store data permanently by making a physical change in the write layer of the disc using a special burner. The system is the M-ARC(tm) disc and the M-Writer(tm) drive.

After the M-ARC(tm) disc is burned it can then be read on other DVD drives. Almost every computer you purchase today have a DVD drive. The install base of DVD drives is absolutely huge.

You can visit http://www.millenniata.com to get more information.

I also don’t think we need to worry about how much space we’re taking up. But just as much as we need to worry about permanence, we need to make sure that the data we store things on, can be used 10,20,30 years down the line. Will that 1TB hard drive be compatible with the computer of the future?

For other documents, I think that keeping them is a better option, especially for anything directly work or expense-related. The threshold for what counts as work related vs. what counts as spam is different for everyone, though.

I’m all for uncluttering everything. Why keep stuff anywhere if it isn’t needed?

Exception: I keep “scrapbook” type material related to my marriage. It is statistically unlikely that DH will outlive me, and so I anticipate several years alone. I am relatively certain that I will find this personal “archive” to be a comfort in that event – and, if in fact I drop dead first, he is the type who would appreciate it as well.

For those who have noted their businesslike methods (JC and enestor19 particularly), thank you – those are great and will help me further refine my system!