Preserving your bits for 100 years

The Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) has a 100 Year Archive Task Force, working to "define best practices and storage standards for long-term digital information retention."

They predict a coming archive crisis at the corporate level, with format problems (what we call "Dear Appy") and also the need to migrate physical storage. They have some suggestions for solving the crisis.

It is great to see serious effort being applied to this important issue. Hopefully, the work done for corporations will trickle down to benefit the individual who wants to retain their life bits.

What would you save if your house was on fire?

(CNN) -- From baby deliveries to unexpected deaths, Mike Bowes, a 911 dispatcher from Quincy, Massachusetts, has handled a wide range of emergency calls.

But Monday night, the 44-year-old received an unexpected call from his neighbor: His own house was on fire.

...

In another coincidence, one of the first firefighters to arrive on scene was Mike Bowes' cousin, Tom Bowes.

Tom Bowes, a firefighter for the past eight years, scrambled into the house to salvage old albums with wedding and baby photos amid the flames.

But everything else -- the clothes, electronics and furniture -- were destroyed.

full story

Those of us without firefighter cousins need e-memories, with off-site backups.

PERSONAL MEMORY MANAGER Product

The announcement of Total Recall solicted an email from Ron C. de Weijzem developer of PMM http://www.pmm.nl/   Ron noted:

"Use PMM practically for studying, (scenario) planning, collecting relevant information, solving complexities (factually or theoretically), designing and modeling or tracking your day-to-day thought development. It is simple, effective and valuable.

PMM is the outcome of a particular (personal) philosophy of memory, that makes it understandable and useful in a wider social/cultural context"

Rseven lifecache service

Total Recall product rollouts continue with a service from Rseven to cache everything from your cell phone:

 It records your daily activities; calls made, text received, pictures taken. When you backup and sync your mobile to Rseven, the Rseven.com website will show those activities in a Timeline format and displays the strength of your relationships with the people that you communicate with 

VentureBeat elaborates:

 It lets you record your incoming and outgoing calls to a voice mail service.

Recording calls has legal implications - it will be interesting to see how they handle that. When Gordon Bell recorded phone calls in his office he had a message say "recording" at the start of every call so the caller could opt out, in order to comply with California law.

I've run software on my Smartphone to record my call records, sms, pictures and voice notes, and I really valued it.

The Data Liberation Front

Previously, I noted that LifeStream helps you get back your captive data from sites like facebook and twitter. Now there is a movement inside google to help people get their data, aptly named the Data Liberation Front. Viva the liberation!

The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.  We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product.  We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products.  This is our mission statement:

Users should be able to control the data they store inany of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier for them to move data in and out.