Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (24 page)

Everyone has an urge to tell his stories. Go ahead and tell yours; it isn’t about being perfect.

STEP III: USE ALL THAT INFORMATION

You will need to organize your e-memories to get the most out of them. It turns out that the bigger the collection, the more care you need to take in how it is organized. People have learned that the way you organized a single bookshelf wasn’t adequate for organizing a whole roomful of bookshelves. And the approach to a roomful of books was not enough to manage the Library of Congress. Amazing as it sounds, your e-memory will be more akin to the Library of Congress than anyone’s personal library. You will be dealing with vast quantities of information.

Of course, you won’t have a paid staff to take care of your e-memories like the Library of Congress does, so something has to be done to reduce the workload. Thankfully, computers are our servants. If you make sure they have good data to start with, then they can do all kinds of automatic classification and lookup. This is why I stressed having the time set correctly for your photos and adding geolocation. With those values set, the computer can sort all your photos by time and space, letting you query by place names, or loading all photos taken during a certain event. Likewise, if you perform character recognition on your scanned paper, then you can search for text in the paper.

Born-digital items tend to have information like this that is useful for organizing your collection. For instance, Web pages have the URL they came from and the date you visited them. E-mails have the address of the sender, the subject, and the date. Digital music has the name of the song, the artist, the album, and more.

Unfortunately, there is still some work for you to do organizing your e-memories. For example, if you simply scan a picture and say nothing about it, all the machine knows is that it has an image scanned on a certain date. It is up to you to add the information to make that picture useful. Also, it can be very worthwhile for you to label bills that you download from the Web. Sure, you can always search for “AT&T” and find all the documents that contain that text, but after years of receiving phone bills you will just get a big pile of them. You might then sift through them by the creation date of the file, but file creation date is notoriously unreliable (sometimes moving a file changes it). You could add the year to your search, say “AT&T 2006,” to narrow it down, but you are still going to have to look in a number of files—possibly some notices from AT&T in addition to bills from that year—to find the one you want.

Suppose, instead, that your files have names like “AT&T bill 2006-08-12.pdf.” Now a glance at the file name will tell you the right one. When you are downloading your bill once a month, it only takes a couple of seconds to give the file name. Or, if you are unwilling even to type a name once a month, suppose you created a folder each year like so: “2008/bills/phone/AT&T”—and then just selected that folder to save your bill in each month. Then, at least, you would know you are only looking at actual bills from AT&T of that year.

You have three ways to add information to help organize your e-memory: putting your files in a good folder structure, creating a useful file name, and adding attributes to the file. All this takes work, and there will be a bigger payoff for some items than others—so you might as well be selective about what you organize. Still, for many items you will be very glad you did a little work to keep things organized so that you can find them again. Our friend Professor William Jones, of the University of Washington, calls this activity “keeping found things found.”

Your computer file-and-folder system is a sort of electronic file cabinet. Using it is no harder than figuring out what hanging folders go in your steel file cabinet and what manila files go in each hanging folder.

You may want to organize folders the way Apple or Windows suggests, which is by the type of information. They create folders like My Books, My Music, My Notes, My Pictures, My Videos, and so on. Or, you may want to create a hierarchy organized around aspects of your life, with folders like My Health, My School, My Work, and My Children. Either will serve; it’s up to you. I like to organize first by the type of information, and then use an aspect of my life as a subcategory. So, I end up with the folder “My Pictures/ My Children/Brigham” for pictures of my son and his family.

Having as much information as I do stored on my computer, combined with being in my seventies, affords me with a new view, what I call “life lines.” Looking back at my own life, I can see distinct chapters or well-defined segments of time: my childhood, the different schools I attended, organizations I worked for, activities, projects I carried out within each of the lives, vacations, my family, and so on. What’s nice about this is that I ended up with everything about a particular life line in one place—a folder with files of pictures, correspondence, notes, and anything else related to that period.

In the Annotated References and Resources, I’ve included my file-and-folder hierarchy as an example of a design of this size. It’s just an example, not a recommendation. Once you get your own collection going, different organizational ideas will emerge. There is no perfect structure! So, just get started and do your best.

For file names, I recommend cramming in as much information as you can. Files get moved around, so it is risky to rely on the name of the folder they are in. The more description, the better. I name my photos with the following information: What/Who; Event; Location; Date—in essence who, what, where, when. Say I’m looking at a photograph of myself and my granddaughter, Kolbe, at her eighth-grade prom. The photo would have the following name:

Bell, Gordon, and Schultz, Kolbe; Eighth-Grade Prom; Hillsborough, New Jersey; 2008-11-15

The last number is the date, November 15, 2008. I used the format year-month-day, e.g., 2008-11-15, because that makes an alphabetic sort the same as a chronological one (and when it comes to file names, alphabetic sort is all you get).

In addition to file name and folder, with some files you can add extra attributes. For example, in Microsoft Office documents, you can set the author and title of the document. For music, you can add your own rating of each song. Photos, of course, have date and location, and this is true for your scanned photos as well as your born-digital ones. The more dates and locations you set in your scanned photos, the better off you will be.

For photos, and some other file types, you can add “tags.” A tag is just a word or phrase that is attached to the file. You can then search and sort by tags. Note that tags, unlike folders, are actually part of the file, so you keep them when the file is moved. Furthermore, with tags you have more freedom than with folders. A file can only be in one folder, but you can apply many tags. So, while a folder system makes you choose whether to file a photo under “My Photos/My Children” or “My Photos/Birthday parties,” there is no problem adding both tags “My Children” and “Birthday parties” to a photo.

STORAGE SOUNDS SIMPLE . . . .

Learn to be aware of where your data is actually stored. Is your e-mail archive on your hard drive or on the Google e-mail server or somewhere else in the Internet? Make sure you use an e-mail client and save copies of all e-mails in your PC. You never know when that provider many decide the business is not profitable enough and close their digital doors, leaving you cut off from your e-mail. Even if you don’t like using a client for your day-to-day use, use it to make backups of your e-mail. I think you will come to appreciate a client, because having the message at your fingertips without waiting for a download saves time and cloud storage space, especially when the message contains large attachments. My own mail archive is approaching ten gigabytes.

I have more than a hundred thousand Web pages saved in my e-memory by MyLifeBits. MyLifeBits Web page capture is completely automatic, and makes a copy of the actual page in addition to recording the page’s address (URL). Unfortunately, at the time of writing, software to make a copy of each Web page is not commercially available. Google’s toolbar has a Web history feature that records URLs and lets you search for text on pages in your history, but they won’t let you download the data, so you are at their mercy to retain your e-memory. Most browsers also have a history of URLs you have visited, but what you can do with them is pretty limited. I’m amazed that there isn’t something better on the market for this now and would be surprised if there isn’t a good product out by the time you read this.

Without automatic recording, it is just not realistic to save every Web page you visit as I do. But there is no doubt you will save some; in particular, your bills and statements that come in HTML format. You can select “Save As” and make a copy of the page, either as a collection of files—the HTML of the page itself plus all the images and other files needed to fully display the page—or as an MHT file that wraps up all these files with the HTML file into a single file. Given the choice of these two, I’d recommend the latter as more manageable.

However, quite a few Web pages actually involve a lot of fancy programming that allows you to see what you see. When you open a saved version of some of these pages, you might find that parts of it are broken, as the browser is expecting you to be logged in using some specific Web service. To make sure that I capture what I see in the browser, I save a print version of the page. The idea is to tell the browser that you are printing out the page, but actually save the print version to your e-memory. If you have OneNote, you will see a “printer” that actually delivers the printed page into a OneNote page. Another way to do this is to install the CutePDF “printer,” a free plug-in program. When you select this “printer” it lets you save what would have been printed as a PDF file. I’d recommend using a print copy of your Web pages rather than HTML, especially for your bills and statements.

You also should be logging all your text messages. Your computer chat program ought to have this as a feature; for example, with Windows Live Messenger, I simply use the setting “Automatically keep a history of my conversations.” Getting SMS messages off your cell phone might require a little more effort. If you have a smartphone, you can get programs like SMS Exporter or SMS Cool!

It is really a shame that more and more communication is being buried inside social Web sites like Facebook. I don’t believe you will want to make the effort presently required to save every single communication in your social Web sites. However, you should be sure to save some favorites, and occasionally just grab the look of your home page for your e-memory. Hopefully these sites will wise up soon and release our data from captivity.

I spoke above about receiving all of your bills and statements electronically. With financial transactions, you should take this even further. Rather than just converting the paper statements to electronic documents, you should also capture the information on a transaction-by-transaction basis by using a program like Quicken or Microsoft Money. These programs will download transactions from your bank, and let you add your own notes to them. You can sort, report, and search through the transactions, which is a powerful form of Total Recall. Doing online banking coupled to Quicken or Money for all your financial transactions will pay in time for everything else.

Credit card transactions are especially revealing. They are a reflection of your life. They tell you how much you spend for essentials, education, dining, entertainment, travel, favorite foods, and so on. The transaction often indicates the location where it was made, too. I can recall who that plumber or electrician was, what restaurant we went to when we had that great cassoulet, and what I got Sheridan for her birthday last year.

Your bank probably avoids sending some messages via e-mail due to fraud concerns. Instead, they have their own proprietary e-mail system that you access through their Web site. If your bank communicates with you this way, make a copy of their messages to you. You may need to explicitly cut and paste the correspondence to a document that serves as a log of correspondence.

THE BEST BACKUP

Many of us make regular backups to an external hard drive. That’s a good start, but if your house burns down you could lose your both PC and your backup drive. To be really safe, you want a backup that is geographically separated from your main machines so that a natural disaster like a flood or earthquake doesn’t take out everything at once.

One way to do this is to back up everything to DVDs or onto an external hard drive. Then mail the backup to a trusted friend or family member who lives far away. That forms your archive, and will be most of your e-memory, since it represents your life to date. Back up subsequent material via an Internet service such as
carbonite.com
,
backup.com
,
idrive.com
,
ibackup.com
, or one of many other such sites.

Don’t think of any replica of your data as reliable. A cloud service could lose your data just as easily as your own hard drive could crash. So, before you decommission your PC, make another full backup, so that you always have at least two copies of your data.

Wells Fargo’s vSafe offers a personal online “safe” to protect copies of your family’s documents like birth certificates, immunization records, wills, tax documents, and more. The service can be looked at as the equivalent of a safe deposit box in a bank.

I mentioned doing quick backups to a USB drive. Another way I make sure I don’t lose my most current work is by using file synchronization. I use Windows Live Sync, but you could try a competing product. Whenever I am connected to the network, Live Sync is synchronizing files in certain folders with Vicki’s computer. As long as I use one of my Live Sync folders, then I am always replicated as recently as the last time I connected to the Internet. Jim Gemmell and I shared a Live Sync folder for this book, and also sent chapters in e-mails to preserve extra backup copies of them.