I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because I'm realizing I am getting old and I'm wanting to reflect on my past. When I talk to my parents about the past and I want to know what grandma or grandpa looked like when they were young, all they had to do was pull out the trusty photo album and voila. Or what was that funny thing sis did when she was 3 years old? Bust out the VHS tape for the instant replay.

But now I'm storing all my memories digitally. All my photos for the past 6 years have been either taken with a digital camera or scanned from a photo and stored on a hard drive while I've lost track of the original print. 65% of the video I've shot are on miniDV tapes and the other part are stored on analog 8mm tapes which only have a shelf life between 10 and 20 years. Which I need to store digitally before the tapes go bad. But where am I storing them? All on a hard drive of course. Along with little text clips from my past, memorable emails, college papers, and other intangible bits that I want to keep around to reflect on.

And what if this hard drive fails? Or, just like that photo album, what if it, god forbid, gets consumed in a fiery death? What are my back up options? How will I be able to safeguard my invaluable intangible digital copies of my memories?

I was reading this very nerdy but needed blog post on storing data and I'm getting paranoid. No one thinks about this until its too late and all they can do is sit there and cry about how they've lost everything. Prevention is key, but with no clear solutions on how to protect myself from this event, what the hell can I do?

Even if I stockpile cheap hard drives to back up these precious bits and bytes, there's no guarantee they'll last. Even worse is that the amount of things I need to safeguard is growing exponentially with the evolution of megapixels and high-def video. Which means, while I might have say hypothetically 20 gigs or even 80 gigs of stuff that I don't want to part with, it'll probably grow in terms of resolution as well as volume with every passing day that I want to document my memories with newer technology. No one has a good answer, and well, even if they did, there's no way to trust it.