FileThis|Fetch - another "keep it forever, keep it together" play.

Check out FileThis|Fetch. They will download your documents from banks and utilities and store them in your repository of choice: Evernote, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, or Personal.com. They are following two trends that will be growing this decade as life-logging emerges and changes society: "keep it forever" and "keep it together."

The first trend is "keep it forever." Way back in the stone age of the 1980s, PCs were for geeks in business, and backups were only done by accountants on floppies. The rest of us had more fun to attend to. Then we hit the day when our family photos existed only digitally and had that aha moment: last year's status reports can get fried, but not my personal photos! More and more people are realizing that they want to keep their bits forever.  Backup services have moved from the fringe of geekdom to mainstream TV and radio ads, and using them has evolved from typing arcane commands to signing up for automated cloud-based services. 

The second trend is "keep it together." One of the first wins we discovered back in the MyLifeBits project was the power of bring data together. Instead of photos in the photo app, email in the email app, location in your GPS app, and so forth, we brought everything together. The result was potent. Now you could find photos taken at the same time as a calendar appointment or look for a document you emailed on the day you were in Boston.

FileThis|Fetch is part of both trends. You can keep access documents after the institution no longer makes them available to you online, or even after you have closed your account. And now you can find, say, all your financial statements from last March without having to login to each institution (your credit card, your bank, your 401K, etc.) individually.

This service is not the first and it won't be the last in this growing space. For example, it has a cousin in the social area called SocialSafe that will back up all your social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) to your hard drive. 

The pitch of FileThis|Fetch says it is "fulfilling the promise of paperless." Back in 1999 when Gordon Bell started his effort to go paperless it opened the door to the world of life-logging and the digital life. Now we can see mainstream culture beginning to follow down his path.

Keep it forever, keep it together!

BBC Digital Planet Interview: A life recorded in bits and bytes.

BBC describes the MyLifeBit project prior to Total Recall: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8206971.stm

The 7 minute mp3 podcast interview, starts 21 minutes into the Digital Planet broadcast and can be downloaded from:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/digitalp/digitalp_20090818-0830b.mp3

The interviewers make the nice observation that many of us, are already saving our lives digitally. All that is required is to not delete anything on our computers, a point we emphasize and re-emphasize in nearly every chapter of Total Recall.

Why did you start recording everything?

Why are you recording everything?—has been a question from the start. It depends who’s asking and when they asked. In the beginning, when I wasn’t sure why, the technology answer was -- “because we can”. Furthermore, in a decade, disks will be a terabyte and this will enable the storage of entire lifetime of everything we can hear and see, at least at a low resolution.

The actual project seed was Raj Reddy’s call from CMU to use the books I’d written as guinea pigs for the Million Book Project. As we describe in chapter 2 this triggered scanning articles I’d written before the professional organizations decided to digitize them. Shortly after starting this decade long project, my boss and mentor, Jim Gray, observed “There are a lot of interesting questions about recording everything. You’re in research. You should try to answer some of them.” In 2009 there are many answers to “why?” that are intertwined with a belief that having everything in your life in cyberspace is the inevitable, constant, quest of personal computing evolution. So everyone will ultimatly have their lives in cyberspace.

Going paperless by never storing or transmitting paper has been a long-term goal. Encoding desk and office chachkas, collectables, ephemera, and memorabilia gets rid of most of the rest of office clutter. “Less” equates to a “green technology”. Just having life’s working bits including pesky bills, wills, medical records, and even manuals accessible anywhere all the time, means that I can live and work anywhere.

When the screen saver started showing pictures from its e-memory then ambience and bio-memory refresh rationalize the effort that ultimately becomes part of one’s immortality.

Thad Starner, who has consistently transcribed his conversations in real time using a Twiddler keyboard the longest agrees—saving everything in e-memory to aid our bio-memories is the most important reason to capture everything. The idea of a permanent, infallible e-memory as the most important "why" escaped Thad, Jim, and me for a long time because we have become so dependent on our e-memories.

The confidence and freedom of having help to remember is quite wonderful. Indeed we've come to think of the partnership: bio-memory has the meta-data or in essence, a URL, to our e-memory where the records, facts, and truths are held.