Food has a life cycle, it starts as a seed, through food and water it becomes a living thing, then we pick/harvest/collect it and the moment it is removed from its life source it starts dying and breaking down.
What if a computer file was like that, it had a shelf life depending on what it is. There is that moment when you open the fridge and find that smelly chicken that you left their last week, what if we were to open our computer and find that file from last month that we hadn’t touched, so it removed itself.
I realise that this isn’t a popular idea. We like to keep and horde our files, after all they are just little files on a computer. They don’t weigh anything, nor cost anything. (But we discussed this earlier in the week).
But in a sense our files are breaking down. Try using a floppy disk from 10 years ago, possibly the hardest part of the exercise is finding a drive to read the media. In a sense that is a breakdown, or a death of a file. The ones and zeros may still be their, but our ability to access them, not so much. Their is research around that shows that by not applying power to an SSD driver for extended periods of time can result in data loss.
While most people would be giving tips on how to avoid this data loss I’d like to ask the question, why do we keep so much data? And is there a lifetime that we should respect when it comes to that data?
Am I going to keep a digital copy of every photos I’ve taken and have sitting on my laptop at the moment for the next 10 years? The next 20 years? I would think not. Which then opens a new question, should I be marking the images as the ones to keep for a lifetime when processing them?
I don’t have the answers. But hopefully I’ll work it out.