Why Are We Generating So Much Data?
While at the 140 Characters Conference in Los Angeles, I spoke for about an hour with Rich Greenberg about Twitter and lifestreaming and where things are going. I’ve long been an overshare person on the web just because I want to have some things to look back on when I’m old. You can read the two posts below for a glimpse into how important data is to me:
As you can see, I certainly put a lot of time into data retention because I have a mantra that time must be accounted for in some way even if it’s something basic like keeping a photo forever because I experienced that moment, took a photo and losing it to a service that goes under or to a hard drive crash isn’t an option. My parents have photos in boxes and I keep mine on hard drives. You lose boxes and hard drives crash but that’s why I have 4 hard drives that replicate weekly and are stored at different locations or I send photos to Zannel, Flickr and iPhoto at the same time so I always have a copy. This is serious but it seems that I’m the only person that gives a crap about the moments that I capture.
Services that backup your data, tweets, blog posts and photos aren’t exactly thriving. People are using these services but they’re not signing up by the thousands like they are to Twitter. It would seem that if you want to spend hours a day broadcasting your life to Twitter, that you would also like to keep that data safe when Twitter eventually goes away.
Will you have memories stored in photo, text or video form when you get older? My YouTube account was suspended due to an error about 6 months ago. I had copies of all of the videos on my hard drives so no big deal I would just lose some of the virality of those videos and viewer count plus the 100 subscribers that I had. It’s amazing how many people have emailed me freaking out because they don’t have copies of the videos uploaded to YouTube, their account was suspended and now they can’t get their videos. Yeah that kind of sucks. Who in the right mind depends on a service like YouTube to keep those life memories FOREVER?
I don’t trust Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or YouTube. I don’t trust any one service for the next 12 months which is why I send my media to multiple sources and have daily backups / snapshots of my accounts. Neither do I trust that my content will be available for the rest of my life so I store everything locally across multiple drives. Despite all of this Rich and I went deeper.
What happens in 10 years when USB 2/3 and FireWire 400/800 aren’t available anymore? What happens to those photos you burned to a CD-R in 2004 and now in 2015 you can’t find a USB 5.0 optical drive that reads CD-Rs so now there’s a coaster that has photos that you can’t even access! This will happen. What then?
So what if I have 4 hard drives that store all of my life moments. So what? The connectors on those drives will soon be obsolete and won’t work with my MacBook Air revision G in 2015. It’s actually pretty crappy how commercialized and fast-paced this has all gotten.
My grandmother has photos taken of my mom in 1975 (11 years before I was born) when my Mom was a cheerleader. Those photos sit in a box or framed on the wall and they’ve been there for 15+ years now! If my grandmother stored them on a 5 1/4 inch floppy 15 years ago, we’d have no way to access them. Imagine trying to find a computer that reads that SCSI hard drive with your child’s baby photos on it and having issues. Photos that are real & physical last forever but digital has to constantly be updated.
Digital is cheaper and easier but it changes so quickly and formats die so often that it’s very hard to embrace it for moments that we really want to save. 12 year ago, the high-end Sony Digital Camera used 3 inch floppy disks and the photos were in bitmap format. Good luck in 5 years trying to find a floppy drive that works with a modern PC.
It brought me to this conclusion. People are all about sharing right now and don’t really think about the real memories. It’s about real memories and looking back in 50 years at those memories and not a single company is preserving memories like that. Everything is about what i ate and here’s a picture of my new car and not focused on the future and how to access it later.
I don’t have an answer. I just want you to think about it.
