Storage

Still "proof-reading" electronic journal entries from 10 years ago. I'm amazed at how relatively more prolific I was back then. Then again isn't that but one of the expected reactions people would have at reading what they've written from a considerable time in the past? Past writing could either evoke admiration at how apparently so much better one has written in the past, or embarrassment because it is the opposite.

For me it's more of admiration at finding that I was, at least around 2000, not a lazy aspiring writer.

And so again, I have this internal debate on whether it's much better to keep journal entries in electronic vs physical medium.

Electronic copies of course have the advantage of being conveniently stored in physically small storage devices. Much better is that they can be edited and read much more cleanly—no strikeout marks, no illegible texts, etc.

On the other hand, there's this fear that the day may come when all technology fails. A doomsday scenario in which we can't run our computers anymore. Gigabytes upon gigabytes of our data, though safely stored in our disks are suddenly unreadable.

This is not an unlikely fear. I was much convinced of this after reading an article a few years ago (in BBC I think) on how we are at risk of losing data because our electronic storage media themselves are vulnerable to the elements. CD's can be rendered unreadable by a scratch, a hard disk by a speck of dust. I have first hand experience of this after my hard disk crashed on me a few years ago. (Fortunately, I have a backup copy of my more important files.)

Such can't be said of things written on a physical notebook. Here you don't need complex electronics to be able to read—just the minimum pair of eyes, and optionally, an understanding mind. Here if you can overcome decyphering the twisting, sometimes almost illegible writing—something all analog writing is in one way or another liable—you have the information you want.

Which is not to say that writing on paper is better in terms of avoiding data loss. If anything, given that they take up much more physical space to keep and maintain, makes them more prone to the very things that can destroy them. Primarily fires and flood. And secondarily, disorganization—imagine pages of manuscripts dissarranged, shelves of notebooks you can't make sense of because they are misplaced and aren't properly indexed. And imagine making backups of physical files. As bulky and space-consuming as it is to keep the originals, think about keeping at least twice that amount of redundant data in hard copy.

At least this problem is significantly minimized with electronic storage. Sure your disks are vulnerable to scratches and specks of dust, but if you have backups, what is the likelihood of your backup meeting the same fate as your original on the same day?

Text searchability and ease of organization are other advantages I can see with electronic file storage. No matter how well-indexed one's library is, searching for an entry takes time to leaf through. With electronic data searches, given the proper search criteria, relevant results can be obtained at far less time.

And so, at the end of this entry, with some 548 words written so far—I know thanks to the computer's word count function—I still haven't really decided which is better. Although I'll admit that in recent years I've made it a point to write exclusively on physical notebooks.

So if one day you find yourself in my room, you'll see this modest pile of notebooks that throughout the years I have filled with my semi-legible handwriting—and quite some few I'm yet to.