Mandi once again had chosen to work today as she wants to make the most of overtime being available; it’s quite good as she gets to choose her hours when working at the weekend. There’s also the fact that you get time and a half that helps to sway her. I went to town with her in pursuit of blank CDs or DVDs to embark on the start of what will become an ongoing task, copying my audio archive to a physical format.

Since my old laptop conked out I’ve been wanting to back up my work into physical, as I no longer believe that anything digital is especially future-proof. I went round my dad’s house at lunchtime and worked through my USB sticks and moved a load of stuff. My American radio show, The Sound Of Nottingham UK (Fridays 11pm and Sunday 1pm EST, Saturday 4am and Sunday 6pm UK), is only an hour long so fits onto a blank CD, and today I copied twenty five of them and filed them away in CD wallet I had bought for the task. Once I had copied them I put the disks in my laptop to make sure that they actually had recorded before I deleted them from the USB sticks. The Sunday Alternative is mostly two hours long, (apart from the brief flirtation we had as a three hour show) and has to be kept on a blank DVD. Every show from 2011 is now safe and sound, which even in the snippets I heard while testing the recordings sounded interesting. It was weird hearing Chris Underwood and Erik Petersen in the co-presenter’s chair, and the way the show seems to have changed over time. The space that this has created on the memory sticks enables me to temporarily move stuff from the computer so I don’t have another episode as I had yesterday.

I feel the need to copy my blogs to Word documents and possibly print them out; once upon a time I thought that anything posted on the Internet was there to stay like a tattoo on the ether. However, if I hadn’t moved my older blogs onto Blogger and had instead kept them on Myspace I would have lost them all when they made the disgraceful move of deleting everybody’s blogs, photos, and videos. Just because nobody uses Myspace anymore (mores the pity, it was the best social networking site in its 1.0 heyday and it still amazes me how people abandoned it for Facebook), I’m pretty sure that people at least liked to think that their old writings were still safe.  I am also digging through the sticks to find my newspaper articles and reviews to print out and put into an old fashioned box file. No electrical fault will cause a box file to lose everything stored within it, unless it’s an electrical fault that causes your house to burn down.

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