inamidst.com · patterns

Archive Everything

Since storage is arguably increasing at a rate just slightly faster than that at which formats are bloating, archiving everything is becoming more and more a possibility. The Web Archive had two petabytes of information in it as of 2006, according to Wikipedia, and Google also archives the entire current web, as well as all the other rival search engines. Having the "web in your pocket" might become some sort of a reality in future.

On a local level, what this means is that, for example, I can easily store the contents of my 3.25GB hard drive from the turn of the century on a small corner of my current 80GB hard drive, or even on a single DVD. At the time I had to graft a little extra space for each new thing that I did, and yet now there are USB keypens and MP3 players that have more storage space.

So why archive everything? Because a) you can, b) it's easy, and c) that means you don't lose things. I have several success stories here: for example, I used to archive my entire web traffic, and often if I wanted to search for an old link, it was a simple case of grepping XML logs. (Sadly, that software, an extension for Firefox, got DataRot). Using my old keylogs I managed to find some namespace documentation that I was searching for, just a few days ago.

Services such as Gmail are already providing storage for us, but it's also important to put in place the usual backup strategies of course. I download all of my Gmail emails locally, ostensibly so that Spotlight on OS X can archive them, but I'm actually not sure I've used that even once. It's nice to know that they're on my hard drive all the same.


Sean B. Palmer, inamidst.com