Personal electronic archiving….hmmm. This has been a concern of mine ever since signing into my first e-mail account. I’ve had the privilege of sorting all my grandparents things after their deaths and have grown a huge appreciation even for scraps of paper with small notes that give some flavor of their personalities. A couple generations later and most of my communication with family members and friends is through e-mail. My solution to the possible loss problem has been to save most of the conversations. There are seven folders in my e-mail account labeled ‘family,’ ‘relatives,’ ‘friends’ I spend some time going through the older e-mails and stashing the thread with the complete conversation on it. Sounds time consuming, but if it were a snail mail conversation I’d do the same thing. I know no one else in my family does this and am pretty sure none of my friends do. Years and years of personality, events and life in general would be lost if I didn’t. Soon as I figure out how to burn CDs on my laptop I’ll get it all onto a disk – and hope to migrate that information to future technology.
