With all the talk of “the cloud” lately, it’s worth looking at how long-term the Web really is.
I got a lesson in this yesterday while building this new Web site. I was putting together an archive of my writing samples, including some of my favorites. And many were not to be found.
Among them:
- A front-of-book (My Turn) essay in Newsweek about gay marriage: 2004.
- Most of my articles for the New York Times: 2004-2007
- Many of the articles I wrote for PC World: 2000-2004
- An entire special issue of Wired that I edited: 2004
- And in addition, maybe up to 10 sets of high-res photos on Flickr (and I pay for that): 2004-2006
In many cases, they may be somewhere, but they don’t come up in a search on the sites, on Google and on the Internet Archive.
Lucking, I have most of this stuff on paper (and probably the photos somewhere on my hard drive). So I spent (and will continue to spend) hours scanning, and editing the OCR text.
Then I realized, these pieces are not necessarily “safe” not that they are on my Web site. I mean, how safe is my hosting provider?
So, I’ll be backing everything up on my computer, and holding onto those paper copies.
(Image: Thomas Guignard via flickr)
