[An introductory note from Harry: I’m pleased to say that Technologizer’s Digital Media Central will be publishing some posts from guest bloggers over the next few weeks. The first to drop in is Ed Bott, whose work I’ve long admired at Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise and Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report, the latter of which lives on ZDnet. Ed and I are also almost-colleagues: He was managing editor of PC World a few years before I showed up there. Welcome, Ed–it’s good to see your byline on Technologizer.]

If you had just two minutes to outrun a fire or tsunami and could take only what you were able to carry from your house, what would you grab first?

Assuming the family and pets were all safe, my first instinct would probably be to start stuffing hard drives into a sack. Especially the ones that contain precious family photos and videos.

But on reflection, I think a smarter move would be to run out the front door with an armload of photo albums and some VHS cassettes. Just about every memory I have from this century is in digital format, but those old photos and tapes are still hanging around, gathering dust and daring me to convert them to bits.

Those old-fashioned media collections, on paper and tape, are like geological markers that define major analog-to-digital transitions in my life. My honeymoon in 1996? Analog. Our 2001 return trip to the same Hawaiian island? Digital, courtesy of the Kodak DC240 camera we began using in 1998. Wedding videos? Trapped on VHS tape in analog format. Videos of our new puppy’s first bath in 2006? Digital, in standard def. This summer’s trip to see Yonder Mountain String Band in Colorado? Digitally documented in high-def, thanks to a new Panasonic Lumix camera that also captures HD video.

Having all that digital media hanging around has its advantages. In most respects, it’s easier to share today’s digital media. I can e-mail a photo or share it on Flickr, and I can upload a video to YouTube in a couple clicks.

It’s much easier to manage, too. Back in analog times, I haunted used record stores and built a collection of more than 500 vinyl LPs. The whole collection weighed several hundred pounds and took up most of one wall in my living room. My music collection today is four times as large, yet it fits on a single hard drive with room for all my digital photos and videos as well.

But with that convenience comes the risk of sudden, catastrophic loss. One hard disk crash can literally wipe out a decade’s worth of memories, including pictures that simply can’t be replaced and a music collection that would take hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to rebuild.

Which is why I’ve become something of a fanatic for digital backup. Every digital media file I own is stored on a home server, which uses  in turn is backed up to an external hard drive. I’ve got copies of those videos and photos safely stashed away on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Every so often, I burn those photos onto a couple DVDs and mail them to a friend for safekeeping. That way, if my house burns down at exactly the same time as an earthquake levels Amazon’s data center, I’m still covered.

Is that obsessive? Maybe just a little. But I’ve talked to plenty of friends and clients who have lost months’ or years’ worth of files because of a sudden hard disk crash. I can’t imagine losing all those memories, nor can I imagine how I’d explain it to Judy.

 
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