Data Dilemmas – Media Matters and Digital Devices

T Minus 23

We live our technological western lives surrounded by data. Electronic binary crammed full of personality. The data itself is invisible taking up no volume. The media upon which it’s stored is heavy and takes up space, space we can’t necessarily afford.

We have a PC which is too big to travel and has nowhere to go at the moment. This will be backed up onto an external drive and wiped. We have an old PC from the loft – operating system corrupted but hard disk full of personal data we need to destroy. We have laptops we will take and a broken one we won’t, again full of data. Numerous pen drives (memory sticks) which need to be checked wiped and thrown; memory cards for cameras we no longer use for which we must do the same.
I have already commented on our soon to be disconnectivity, but we are still western and some of data must travel with us. We have entertainment in CD’s and DVD’s, the former we will leave (backed onto mp3 and carried on iPods) and the latter we’ll carry (shod of it’s bulky cases. Boxes of the aforementioned dispatched to mum for safekeeping.
In some ways the media is saving space; so much data has been scanned and deposited in the cloud virtue of Dropbox and Google Drive, the physical having been shredded beyond recognition; Kindles have replaced books. However, the process of digitising our lives brings with it a paper trail which can compromise security. You can’t just give away an old computer or dump an obsolete hard drive. So the main thing exercising my brain at the moment is what to do with the media? The clock is ticking and decisions must be made against a background of so many other decisions.