Finding some pretty striking and pretty sad draft posts in my Google Drive, which honestly I haven’t looked at in many years. I started using OneDrive and Word exclusively a while ago and cleaned out my Google Drive to save money. I put everything on my NAS and deleted it from Drive except for the Google Docs. Those don’t take up any space, and there were about 1200 of them. So I figured I would just let them sit there until – well, probably forever. I saw no need to really mess around with them.

Now My NAS is getting older and I need to make a backup and put it somewhere else. Backups are tough. Without backups though you get no archive. And when I start to make a backup, I become an archivist. I have to decide what is worth keeping and what gets tossed. It’s costly to archive every single document and file you have on every computer. My NAS has a functional 16TB of space with 7.5 of it used. We’ll have to get bigger one day but at that point, I’ll just buy a new NAS unit with more drive bays. Restoring 16TB of data should be made as easy as possible. So I’ve been curating.

I’ve thinned out the backup as much as possible but in so doing found some drafts of things that I can’t believe I wrote – they seem too good for me from 11 years ago. I found some very sad, very angry things too – all of which I think I’ll post on here. They are worth sharing even though they strike me as not my own.

Years ago I did some archival research at the University of Maryland and met a great archivist there who was too busy to really spend time with me although he helped me a lot in preparing my visit. On my last day there we met and he apologized for being so busy – he had just been dropped into (or had dropped on him) boxes of Spiro Agnew’s archival material. Most of which was socks and gifts of geographically-themed ashtrays. This seems like garbage to me, but the rubric of the archivist says: Who are we to decide what future scholars should have access to? What becomes important in the future? What should we keep for them if not everything? It’s a tough thing to try to guess about future significance.

For me I’m glad I have a lot of backups. You can see on this “new” blogsite I have thousands of posts restored from frequent backups from all my old blogs, including the one from 2007 where I’m speculating about what it will be like to work at St. John’s. That positivity aged like milk, but it’s still nice to see it there. Is this an archive of ideas, and have I saved too much?

It’s late here and everyone is in bed, but I can hear my NAS uploading the backup to the cloud server.