The New Year is upon us and it is time to make our resolutions. Most of us will do the typical I’m going to try and lose weight. Sure I’m going to try again to lose weight, however I try to avoid the gym the first couple of weeks of any new year until everyone else has given up on that resolution! For 2012 the big resolution that will require a big commitment and effort is going to be going digital.
Going digital, what does that really mean? I gave up on the Franklin Covey binder years ago when the Blackberry was completely synchronized with exchange. We got our first digital camera over 10 years ago and all the photos we’ve taken since are stored somewhere on a computer. Our music, music has been digital since CD’s came out. What I really mean is taking it online. I think now this digital thing can actually work with the right combination of cloud based services.
I’m not just talking about our photos and music. I also want to digitize all of the home videos, from the VHS-C tapes we have through the 8mm and whatever other formats we encountered along the way. All of the documents we have to keep and the ones yet to arrive, yes those too. Everything that we can digitize – paper, audio, video, and photos; I’m going to try and do it.
So why hasn’t someone who has embraced technology, whose very career is all about technology, done this yet? Primarily because desktops and laptops only last so long, I never wanted to invest in tape backup, and we have too much data to store on a single DVD. Our pictures have bounced between hard drives as I have tried to preserve the images from drives as they begin to fail. I’ve lost portions of my music collection that I spent days ripping from CDs several times when drives suddenly failed. I just don’t want to spend the time and money needed on backups and disaster recovery that is necessary to go completely digital.
Now, the time seems right; I’m going to put my trust in iTunes match and Googles services to be my repository for all things digital. The first step was turning on iTunes match. All my music was matched and those tunes that were not found moved online. I’ve decided to re-rip those CD’s that were lost in drive failures and device swap outs hoping that iTunes match will be around for a while.
For pictures I am going with Picasa. I have used Flickr for some time now, however I like the tagging features in Picasa and it seems to be a lot easier to upload the thousands of photos in hundreds of albums we have.
Next are the videos. These are going to take some time. I’m going to try and use a YouTube account and upload the videos. The first step is getting all of those old videos from tapes of various formats to a digital format.
Finally, will be the paper documents. Right now I’m thinking of scanning and uploading to Google docs the important documents we receive throughout the year and also archiving the ones we’ve had in storage for quite some time. While we won’t get away for paper entirely, I hope to reduce considerably the amount of paper we have around the house.
So this year I’m going to go digital. I hope to post more of this adventure as I move more information online – into the cloud. I will post on what seems to work, what doesn’t and what to watch out for. Please feel free to comment on any ideas, thoughts or experiences you have in moving your personal information online.
Happy New Year!