I’ve been back and forth to Ottawa several times this past fall to help my parents. They were moving into a smaller place and they needed help with downsizing. They’ve been storing a bunch of my stuff for decades. When I first moved to Toronto as a student, I couldn’t take all my things. Those things ended up getting packed away when my parents moved at that time. Since then, those boxes have made multiple moves and their contents have been forgotten. I’m reminded of that shot of the giant warehouse of forgotten relics at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I returned to Ottawa and I sat in my parents’ house, surrounded by memories from my childhood – notebooks, comic books I had drawn, board games I had created, schoolwork, and an old computer (of course!) – an Amiga.
I returned home with my treasures and have been sorting through them – constantly overcome by nostalgia as I rediscover artefacts from my childhood. I’m finding it hard to let go but let go I must.
You, like me, must have accumulated a great deal of physical and digital detritus over the years. That includes physical media that maybe you can’t even read anymore. I unearthed old audio tapes, 3 1/2 ” floppies, and ZIP discs (a 100 MB storage medium back from when 100 MB was a lot of space). My daughter Anna loves everything vintage so she pulled a bunch of tapes from my old collection and then she bought a Walkman (remember those?) on Kijiji.
The tech is still floating around to read that old media but those devices are getting harder to find. What should we do? One solution is to keep the readers. My old boxes included a ZIP drive that can read those 100 MB ZIP discs. I also have a VCR (on loan) for reading old VHS tapes. But, those readers present 2 problems: firstly, they break down and repairing them becomes ever more difficult. Secondly, even if the reader works, how does it connect to your modern tech? That ZIP drive has a 25 pin serial cable that doesn’t talk to any port on my computer now.
Another solution might be to transfer media to a newer format while we still have functional readers. There are services out there that can do the transfers for you – even going farther back to various motion picture formats like 16mm or Super8. We might keep files in the cloud. Or we could create hard copies.
Or maybe we abandon them entirely.
My parents’ move has forced me to go through those old memories to determine what I’m going to keep. You might consider looking at your personal media but also at your business media. Over the years, I’ve ended up managing a great deal of content for my clients – primarily images but also logos, designs, and of course all things related to their websites.
Who is responsible for your business’s digital archives?
Let’s talk if you need some help getting that organized.
Photo credit: DS Stories & Steven Spielberg