Data Should Be Preserved

I believe that data should never be lost. Specially data that are costly to make and have memory value. Texts, drawings, photographs, songs, programs, and videos should always be preserved, even if you are not interested on them anymore. They may live in a compressed file inside that old 512 GB HDD you hardly ever mount, but you have no reason to erase them. In fact, I think you should store them more safely than that, as there are several reasons to preserve them. Time flies, and as you see yourself aging you may want to remember how life was when you were younger. Not just by one yellowed picture. But by what you created.

What you produce in your limited lifetime is your legacy. All of it. It tells about you. It describes you in different stages of your life and should be safely stored for remembering moments that - no matter how sad or how happy - made up your existence. This post is to highlight the importance of writing, drawing, photographing, composing, creating, and, ultimately, preserving.

Not content just for the sake of it, but your life, for the importance of it. Even if you don’t care, maybe your family and close relatives one day will. Maybe historians years after from now will. Maybe another species someday will.

Lastly, I would ask you to keep as much as you find convenient of this data public. Share it, present it, distribute it, publish it, index it, so you can live for much more than your organic survival and let what you created during your lifetime contribute to the lives of others.