Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [84]
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