Don't write anything down, but save everything that anyone else writes down.
It would be better for everyone if we deleted everything by default and saved the things that are important to us.
We've never been anti-permanence. We just belief deletion should be the default.
But we will lose the millions of records being created daily in a dizzying array of electronic forms unless we find a way to preserve and keep them accessible indefinitely.
Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.
Instead of using new technologies to preserve for ready discovery material that might in the past never have been stored, or deleting everything as soon as possible, we can develop systems that place sensitive information beyond reach until a specified amount of time has passed or other conditions are met.
I've got tons of irreplaceable information inside the soul of this computer.
Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.
Well-secured files don't do you much good if you lose them in a fire or hard drive crash.
The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time span.
The information. Every bit that of information that was ever in your brain. But the information is not the mind Jenna. That we've never accomplished before. What we've done with you is groundbreaking. We cracked the code. The mind is an energy that the brain produces. Think of a glass ball twirling on your fingertip. If it falls, it shatters into a million pieces. All the parts of a ball are still there, but it will never twirl with that force on your fingertip again. The brain is the same way.
If I'm expected to keep your messages, and everybody else's, then there should be a law that says, you need to keep all of these.
Michael Cohen is one of the world's greatest evidence hoarders. He rarely threw anything away.
The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.
Despite the value of open data, most labs make no systematic effort to share data with other scientists.
People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives.
Your next SMS will probably be around longer, and remain more legible, than your tombstone. For, unlike your tombstone or even your mortal coil, your texts may be worth something.
So we should preserve it. I don't think that digital storage is necessarily a good thing, but I definitely think that digital manipulation is interesting.
Data is fungible. You can make as many copies of it as you want.
I am anxious to give away information, for it is only by giving it away that you can keep it. When you have told it, you remember it. It is with information as it is with liberty, the only way to be dead sure of it is to give it to other people.
All of my memories are now on hard drives. I'll change phones or I'll change my laptop, and all my photos stay.
Digital data are more fragile than printed material.
Archiving is extremely expensive and time consuming. I'm sure an archivist would tell me I'm doing it wrong. It's an industry that's built upon essential ideas, and some of those practices are abusive.
I go through all of my old notebooks, and I put an X on every page when everything has been entered into the computer, and sometimes that takes 15 years. But eventually the notebooks are full of X's, and they're no good to me anymore.
