I’m jealous of all the people who journal on their laptops. It would be so nice to have a digital copy of every word, searchable by topic. How wonderful to find every mention of a topic in a simple search. But no. Not me. I’m mister stone age, with a book and pen.
It was an easy decision, actually. Every media is vulnerable to damage. Print is vulnerable to water and fire. Digital is vulnerable to those, plus theft, magnetic pulses, energy scarcity, etc. There are more ways to keep me from my media with digital. Call it paranoid, but I don’t take energy for granted. I know that any year, we could hit a global economic rough patch and prices rise beyond our budget.
Paranoid? Doubtful. I want access to all my journals regardless of the world economy.
Set all that aside. Right now, I’m facing the same dilemma with photos and videos. Stored on my laptop, they’re vulnerable to a hard drive crash (been there. done that). Back up to server, Mozy, whatever, and they have a bad server that goes down. Content lost. There’s no failproof way to preserve your media. Unless you store it on 5 different servers in 5 different cities. Then MAYBE you can assume you’re safe. But who has time for that level of redundancy?
So here I am, back to journaling with a pen and a moleskine.
Now if I can just find a backpack large enough to fit them all…
Question of the Day: What do you write with, and why?
I’ve been thinking lately that I should scan in all of my old journal books. There’s a lot of personal history there.
But there is something lovely about cracking open that book and reading about my life – a feeling that I don’t quite get from a print-out.