Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [83]
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