I mentioned previously my plans to build a repository of my data over the years. This has been going more slowly than I would have liked, in part because there is a lot of data to look at, but also because there is so much there that I'd forgotten I had written and I've been spending too much time reading it!

I have found that I kept a lot of things which, in retrospect, seem very curious. There are a great many source archives and FAQ files which I obviously downloaded in the expectation that they would be useful, and then never used. There are old versions of GNU tool sources, and an archive of the BOFH pieces that Simon Travaglia did years ago before he got his permanent gig at The Register. All of this makes sense in the context of a machine connected to the net by a 14.4kbps modem, when it took hours to download this stuff and it was so much harder to find things, but in these days of broadband connections and pervasive search engines it makes far less sense to hang onto things like that. There is a risk that some of what was free might become pay data, but the actual value to me of hanging onto these obsolete is rather small. And yet... I am reluctant to just consign them to the bit bucket. My thinking is that I will at least keep a record of what I had kept, and possibly some link to same (or a more recent version), but I know that a fifteen year old version of the awk source will not be going into my personal data repository!

I have almost completed storing the data from my Archimedes and its companion computers in a form consistent with how I organise my files now, and once that is done I can get on with the actual repository building.

Posted by Dunx at August 11, 2003 09:41 AM