How is your relationship with your documents, pictures, music, your creations? Do you back up regularly? Do you think you are using the appropriate medium for storage and the right time interval? (They say to back up as often as you are willing to lose data.) Do you store backs off-site? Do you fireproof them?
If you truly treasure every pixel you splash onto the screen, you’ll save it and store it safely and consistently. And you’ll keep extensive records of these backings, so that you can metadatamange your work—or think about your data management so that you can make decisions like getting old data off your computer, finding out why one folder has more activity than another, spotting out any unusual activity, and so on.
In David Meizlik’s blog entry, “The Ten Commandments of Data Loss Prevention (DLP),” he talks about what you can do to make sure you are securing your electronic files optimally. The entry is tailored more for businesses, but it’s easy to re-frame to personal data use. Some of my favorite tips he mentions are “Thou shall accurately identify data,” “Thou shall address data in three states: data at rest, data in use, and data in motion,” and “Thou shall include an advanced policy framework [of how, why, by whom, and to whom data is sent, used, or stored].”
Does that sound too nitty gritty? Too anal? Too micro-managerial to you? It does sound like it could be a lot of work, but that foresight you cultivate goes not to waste. Just think, if something happened to your computer, you’d be that much more prepared to troubleshoot the problem by having an extensive history of your computer activity, and what information went where, how, and why. And if your computer lost all its data, you’d have back-ups on hand.
We have to remember it’s not the computer that is responsible for our work, it’s just keeping it safe for us for now; we can transfer our files at almost any time, as long as they are still there.
The computer is just in between you and your creations. You can only trust you to take care of your documents in the way only you can know how.
