Archives

Imagine you were mucking around with your boyfriend, your sister and her boyfriend, and your friend and his girlfriend, and you decided to take lots of photographs of yourselves. Nothing compromising of course, but fun, spur of the moment stuff not really meant for anything more than a quick giggle among close friends.

You download them onto your father’s computer, throw out all but the ones you want to keep, burn those onto a disk and immediately erase the lot before getting on with your next distraction.

If your father was a bit diligent about computer management, and had automated the back-up process so that archives were happening every hour or so (just like the new Mac OSX Leopard does - have I mentioned the new iMac arrived yesterday?), there’s a fairly good chance that, without any sinister intent, that before any incriminating files could be erased, somewhere on a hard-drive in the cupboard next to the desk, another copy would already have mysteriously come into existence.

Every few years, whenever I upgrade my computer, I try to do a complete audit of all our archived material, removing files that are never going to be needed, synchronising others that might come in handy one day.

It’s a task which ranges between dead boring, and highly entertaining, and while some would argue it’s entirely unnecessary, it can be a bit like looking through a shoebox found in the back of a cupboard.

There’s a veritable Aladdin’s cave of memories long not remembered, receipts, photographs, invitations all to be opened, sighed over, then archived again to await rediscovery, probably in five or six years’ time, during the next cycle of computer replacement.

Why am I posting this, some may wonder, after all the picture is hardly compromising, and the explanation fairly mundane. Surely not just to announce that the poor old eMac is being put to sleep?

No.

Think of it as insurance.

Just in case, on a computer far, far away, someone somewhere discovers something that incriminates me in some small way that would be bound to cause embarrassment were it to see the light of day. (However unlikely that may seem.)

Just remember kiddies, I have the negatives!