Parlour

Mark Pilgrim writes about how he tries to protect his ever growing mass of data. It seems as if the solutions to secure your data are either complicated, need a lot of work, are simply expensive, or all of that.

A great, easy and cheap backup solution is desperately needed. The average computer user won’t pay or simply not know how to backup his digital data. His amount of digital data is nevertheless growing. Digital photos and videos, enormous amounts of documents. You can’t just put that in a shoebox in the attic and forget about it for the next 50 years. You have to be the nanny for your data. But the average computer user won’t get that. Not because he is dumb – simply because nobody told him and because the solutions look like something the Enterprise would use.

It’s important to protect data. Easier and cheaper solutions for backup have to be found, solutions everyone can understand and use, because a solution may not be enough, it must be a good solution.

Securing your digital data may not be harder than securing your analog data, maybe it’s even easier (e.g. copying digital stuff is way easier than copying analog stuff), but it’s nothing we humans are accustomed to. We’ve taken care of analog data since the very beginning of human culture and we obviously learned how to handle it, but nobody told us how to take care of our digital data at the beginning of the multimedia age.

We need computers that backup on their own. And, first of all, we need awareness, that backing up your data may be more important than one might think. Can anyone imagine how sad and depressing our lives would be without these dusty old pictures in the shoebox …?