One effect of the Blogger outage of 13 May has been to make many reconsider their backup, to suddenly doubt the wisdom of relying solely on the cloud.
When I first began working with computers storage consisted only of paper tape or punched cards (for input) & concertina-folded, green-lined sprocket-holed paper for output. Some of this information may survive today in the form of extracts in printed reports or bundles of cardboard files in the archives.
My personal computerised archive dates back to the early 90s when I acquired my first Amstrad Notebook. Hard lessons, learned when technological changes in computing almost always brought some crisis over lost or unusable data or programs, meant that I was scrupulous about back-up from the beginning – the pain of any loss now would be personal – at first on 5” then, as I moved on to Windows, 3” floppy discs.
And so my personal archive remained reasonably secure right up to the Sunday of the week in which my last laptop expired – backing up was a slow & tedious affair, relegated to an end-of –the-week chore. I was totally off-line at home (no broadband).
And remained secure for a couple of years after that, while I searched fruitlessly for something that wasn’t an Apple, but was lighter than a 5-lb bag of potatoes, to carry around with me.
The public library came to my rescue as far as internet access went, but was, understandably, unable to provide disc space for personal storage, so I was delighted to discover Google Documents; for once I was quite an early adopter & began the slightly tedious business of transferring files from more than 20 floppy discs to cloud.
Until disaster struck. The library closed access to the computer for a couple of days for a system upgrade. Next time I went in the floppy disc drives had disappeared.
But the libraries in a neighbouring authority still had them, & I also found out that I could buy an external floppy drive if necessary, so the remaining files were transferred.
The next emergency was caused by an attack of malware on the library system, which eventually had to be closed down for about a week for cleaning & reinforcement of the defences. Even after it was opened up again we were barred from using anything like memory sticks or mp3s &, far worse from my point of view, barred from access to Google Documents on the public side of the desk, though not, for some strange reason, to Blogger. I learned the value of e-mail attachments for temporary storage.
But it also made me re-evaluate my reliance on the cloud.
Paper, after all, remains the safest, more durable & go-anywhere medium.
I have never kept a personal diary. The few attempts I made as a teenager, when I thought it was a compulsory thing for a girl to do, ended in abject failure. How on earth could I sum up all the experiences of each day in a few well chosen words? And I was only too well aware that some emotional reactions – so & so was horrible to me … I love X … it’s NOT FAIR … would just be embarrassing to re-read. Some things were even too private to commit to paper or formulate in words at all, must just remain hugged or buried somewhere internally.
Then I learned about commonplace books & after several false starts began a series which continues to this day, over 40 years later.
For about 25 of those years they are purely manuscript notebooks, changing in character to match both the changes in me & the exact format of the notebook I was using at the time. Some didn’t really work & were abandoned – left on the shelf. What started as just quotations from other people expanded to include, at various times, my own thoughts, overheards, recipes &, in the age of Pritt Stick, cartoons, pictures, interesting bits of graphic art.
So they are intensely personal, occasionally taken down & re-read. The surprising thing is that they provoke, stimulate, evoke memory more intensely than any contemporary private account could ever do. I may remember where I was, who I was with, why I was reading that source, even the cover or details of the book.
Then I moved to Word documents, all printed out at intervals, in the days when I had a dot matrix printer (never ink-jet, the invention of the devil), then laser printer in the library.
I still make commonplace books, though to some extent this blog has taken over some of their function, & even intertwines & makes use of some of the stuff recorded in the old manuscript ones.
After the malware attack had made me acutely aware of the vulnerability of my blog for so long as it was stored purely electronically, I started to think about ways of downloading that on to paper too.
Current practice is to dump it each month into a Word document, edited down to pure text with all the furniture removed, then print it out in black & white at 10p per page.
After the latest shock of the Blogger outage I have begun the process of downloading all my stuff from the cloud & onto a memory stick – something which, compared to the uploading from floppy disc is extremely fast & will probably be finished in no time at all. It is also jaw-dropping to find that what I have done so far still does not produce a noticeable blue line on the cerise pie chart that represents the amount of available storage used – I just have no mental image of what 4Gb is (are?), but I can say that I have so far downloaded nearly 200,000 words & have only just begun.
Some time ago I also began the process of transcribing the old commonplace manuscript notebooks into machine readable form – a very as-&-when activity to fill the idle moments when I had nothing better to do, which may be speeded up now that I have the Notebook. The advantage of doing this is the ability to FIND or SEARCH these memory banks even when I am far from home.
What all these upsets have done however is to reconfirm my feeling that I do not want to be my own online IT manager at home. As things stand, when disaster (major or minor) befalls I can get up, walk away & leave it to the professionals to sort out, without having to worry about whether all is compromised or there will be a big bill to pay. Irritation & frustration are small prices to pay. Nor do I have to concern myself with security, the need for software upgrades, or any of the other mysterious messages which sometimes appear on the screen.
The public library fills that gap now that I do not have the backup of an IT department at work or university, as it does for many others who never had those advantages in the first place.
Martha Lane Fox, founder of lastminute.com & now the government’s internet champion with a target to get the ten million people in this country who have never used the internet on line by 2012, allowed in an interview with Stephanie Marsh published in Saturday’s Times Magazine that she had been irritated by that same government’s attack on public libraries, making it seem that these are fusty old places which offer only fusty old books to customers who are mainly elderly, while allowing that a few had modernised by turning themselves into coffee bars which attract teenagers. She thinks that public libraries will have an important role top play in getting everybody on line. Even though I think that phones & tablet computers – when the price & the technology settle down – I agree with her.
There was a time, starting in the Seventies & extending even into the Nineties when public libraries did seem to go into decline, the haunt of the sad, mad & lonely, offering books which were often in a condition which made you reluctant to take them home & which anyway were easily available in paperback or, for increasing numbers, in the library at college or university.
Then came the internet & Amazon & enough money to spend on as many books as you wanted. Who needs public libraries, the more affluent decided. I was even one of those myself.
The politicians seem to have missed the changes. The picture they were so busily describing this spring – well that was by a Salon Painter in the Age of Impressionism.
Public libraries have been offering free internet access & free taster courses for years now. I am surrounded by users of all ages, including pre-schoolers, those learning citizenship, people searching hard for jobs (there is no charge for printing out your cv), researchers into family or local history, people pursuing very specialist interests, online gamers, student researchers, grandparents needing access to a scanner to send photos as email attachments, a lot of Facebook users, people watching films & video & highlights of football matches, a few typing diligently.
The librarians can all offer friendly help & advice in all this, while making it perfectly clear that they cannot do your searching for you.
Librarians keep adjusting to all the changes that take place in the world – which after all is their world – of information. There are still lots of books on offer – a very well-edited selection of them on display either on shelves in the old fashioned way, ordered in accordance with the Dewey system, or in eye-catching displays on different themes or subjects, or in the goldmine of the basement, retrievable in a few minutes, no need to wait around at home for the delivery van.
There are coffee mornings, advice sessions, book groups, stories & singing for babies, help with homework.
The only complaint I could possibly make is that they are not open long enough, or indeed at all on Sunday.
