If it all Goes Away – Saving Your Life Story “Plan B”

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No longer does a biography need to be lost to time, now we can save your Life Story from all the things that can destroy it including time. In Episode 18 of Create Your Life Story we consider the different options and media for archiving our Life Stories and why.

We know why we need to record our Life Story. Initially recording your precious audio is the most important thing you can achieve for yourself and for the whole project of capturing a Life Story but if it’s not maintained and protected from the many forms of deterioration, the effort that you have gone to could be for nothing. We need to protect the audio from being lost over time. To archive it, so as to ensure that if one system fails there are back ups to recover the audio, text, images and video of this Life Story.

The great thing today compared to the past is we have our audio as a digital file and can copy it as many times as we like without the deterioration of the audio quality as was the issue with rerecording audio onto analogue systems such a tape. There is no harm in having multiple copies, in multiple formats scattered around to protect it from unfortunate events. It’s all digital and it’s all identical.

With some items in our lives there can only ever be one copy but that is not the case today with digital data. If it’s recorded or transferred to digital it’s then possible to have an unlimited number of identical copies. No longer do we have to grab the photo album in a crisis situation. If we have a copy off site we simply get it and we’re up and operating again, just like before.

We have to make copies and we have to keep them safe

We have already gone a good long way to having a permanent solution for archiving our digital data with our strategy of using stable, well regarded sites, to hold our data with WordPress.com and Archive.org. These organisations should be around for a long time and if they do decide to shut down we could expect them to give us timely opportunity to recover our data and transfer it to other places. However as we are not in control it’s prudent to make sure we also have our own copies. Additionally we also need to have back up data to reload onto their services if something should go awry with their equipment or if we have

issues with our back ups. The reasons for making multiple copies are:

* Hosting sites shuts down

* Physical disaster

* Original recording media deteriorates

* Playback technology evolves

In order to upload data to a hosting site you needed a copy on your own machine so you already have a personal copy with you to use if you need to update the hosting sites if something goes wrong.

Copy your site

In writing posts directly into WordPress or Archive.org it’s also important to recover a copy of the content.

There are two components of the content on your site. The actual content that we read and the data. Both need to be saved.

Download a copy of your WordPress.com site as it is, not the data of the site but the actual site using website to PDF conversion software like PDF Download. This software downloads a copy of your entire WordPress and Archive sites as a viewable and printable copy. Additional to keeping the PDF file also have a physical printed copy created. Best practice would be to not use your bubble jet printer as the final copy but have it laser printed or one of those