PSA: Back Up Your Shit

Honestly, my Twitter feed, Facebook, and SMS records could all disappear tomorrow, and I would be OK with it. Maybe there's value in my accumulated Facebook connections and history, but most of the value today comes from current content.

Now email, that I value for archival.

I think that the beauty of Snapchat is that it frees you from this ridiculous notion that a text, IM, Facebook message, etc, has any value.

In my opinion, it doesn't. Also, in my opinion, I believe that feeling the need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense of self-worth, and that everything you say has value and needs to be saved.

I never, ever peruse through my messages, to reminisce over an old conversation. It's too much navel-gazing to suit my sense of pride. What actually matters is the actual relationship you have with a person, which is built on the BODY of IMs, messages, conversations, visits, dinners, parties, etc, that you shared with that person. Sometimes, it's best to leave good conversations in the blurry past, and just remember that a certain person is funny, a great conversationalist, etc.

I'm doing the same sort of thing with Google now. I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. When we talk, it's about whatever resides in our own brains, be it good, bad or ugly. The entertaining part of any conversation is the actual conversation, the passion, the humor, etc. If all we wanted to do was pass around facts, then we can forward each other URLs and be done with it. When I'm talking with someone over dinner, we're not hammering out a contract that requires precision, we're having a conversation over ideas, and as funny as it sounds, facts aren't as important as the spirit of the conversation. Unless of course you're in an argument with someone, and then that isn't very much fun so why even bother starting the conversation in the first place.

> Somebody sits down, puts pen to paper and writes a letter? Folds it, puts it in an envelope, adds postage, and mails it?

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I do. Largely because people use so few of the things. It doesn't get mixed in as a contact from some email address you've never seen before with 15-100 other emails that someone might get in a day.

If it's someone I know and correspond with regularly, then email, sure. Convenience takes precedence over distinctiveness in that case. But when I get a non-personal contact, for instance from a business or a friend of a friend asking about something, I still take the time to put the response on paper.

Nope, not just you. I consider it digital hoarding in a lot of ways. I keep a lot of emails around as they're actually useful to reference at later times and easily searched and archived. But IM, Twitter, IRC, Facebook, SMS, etc I treat as passing and never look at messages further than a few weeks back.

Honestly, a lot of what you have to say make sense, it does... But then I remember that I still have the emails my wife exchanged almost ten years ago when we first met - and occasionally I do look back at those. And I fall in love with her all over again.

And then there are the random musings from friends who have died or any of a dozen other, slightly less big deal reasons to look back -- and I realize that in fact, those old conversations do matter, to me, often in unpredictable ways.

Your mileage may well vary, but I'd be truly sad if I lost those bits of history. Moreover, I wish I had access to that sort of an archive from my parents or grandparents... So maybe it'll be interesting to my kids. Maybe not. But the thing is, I don't know what's really going to matter and when disk space (on this scale especially) is a so cheap, it seems foolish not to save it.