Modern technology is fabulous, isn't it? I can't remember the last time I wrote anything important by hand (unless it was under exam conditions), and I have to admit that half the time what I write never escapes the bounds of electricity.
There are problems involved with information that is purely digital, though. For example, the other day I was going through some of my old storage boxes when I found a whole pile of five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy discs. I remembered using them on the old school computers, back in the day when I used WordPerfect 5.1 on DOS.
Strangely, I actually remembered some of the files that were on those discs - short stories and poems I wrote for assignments and competitions. Part of me wouldn't have minded being able to read them to see if they were worth trying to salvage. Of course, I don't have ready access to a computer which can read the discs, let alone the files, so in the end I decided I didn't care about any of them enough to track down a way to retrieve them.
There-in lies one of the basic problems with digital technology - things change too quickly, and something that was just fine five years ago can present problems with retrieval today.
So what's the best practice involving digital material?
First of all, check your files periodically. Most computers are backwards compatible... to an extent. They can open something three years old without too much trouble, but if it was created on a version of the program that has been superseded too often you might have trouble.
You should go through your folders and see if there is anything you particularly want to keep. Then open them with the most modern version of the program (or alternative to that program) that you can use and save it in the newer format. Yes, this is time consuming. So is spring cleaning. Both are worth doing. In reality you'll probably only need to do this every two or three years, but you should make sure you take the time to do it.
Secondly, have more than one copy of any important files - and have them on different storage devices. Discs are rapidly becoming things of the past and USB drives will someday follow suit, but these things to have a brief cross-over period. Also, some of the "next big things" in data storage are shockingly short-lived. Make sure you have copies of your important files on the last most popular thing as well as the next big thing - but also keep a copy on an honest to goodness hard-drive.
Thirdly, anything that is terribly important (and this especially applies to the assignment that's due this Friday) should also exist in print form for as long as it's needed. Why? Because computers are evil and are secretly trying to mess with your head. Should all else fail and you loose every digital copy you can access, having the print copy on hand means you don't have to completely re-create all of your work.
The joy of paper is that you can still read it long after the printing process that produced it is obsolete. Digital can't match that yet, so don't rely on it entirely.
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