“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!'”
C.S. Lewis
A few weeks ago I had an interesting conversation with another person who also kept something to write easily available, no matter where she was (including the bed). It was one of those “Thanks whoever, I’m not the only one.” moments. However, she was quite taken aback by the idea of having rented a safe-deposit box at a bank to safely store hard-disks of personal information, ideas, realized projects, and the like.
Why?
Some people rent safe-deposit boxes to store jewels, money, or the like. I don’t have much of either. But if someone would ask me what the most valuable things are that I own, on the top places would be the ideas I had and the projects I have realized.
Seriously, the ideas do not come back. You might think that once you had an idea, it’s easy to remember. A long time ago, I found out that this is not the case for me. I forget — a lot. I’m continuously surprised when I look at my jotted down ideas — which is probably the main reason why I spend so much time arguing for capturing and collecting ideas. At least if you have a lot of them, you cannot remember all of them — which makes it hard to realize creative projects.
And for projects — there are a few projects where I have worked for years to get them realized. The “Organizing Creativity” books both took years to develop and write, my first book of quotations took about 5 years (it had 2534 pages, after all, one reason it was ‘only’ a PDF), others took months of my time. And given that time is the most precious resource — I would hate to lose them.
So, given the value of ideas and realized projects, why not invest a couple of bucks a year to rent a safe-deposit box and use a spare set of hard-disks to keep a backup there?
All you need is double the amount of disks you need to make a single backup. Every time you do a major backup, you visit the bank with the hard-disks that have the current backup and exchange them in the vault with the previous backup version hard disks. You take those home and the next time you make a backup, you do it with these hard disks.
So, even if you get mugged on the way home, or your home burns to the ground, or lightning strikes and reduces your precious technology to ugly-sized paperweights, or the computer-savvy ex formats your hard-drive (or something similar) — you have an (almost) untouchable copy somewhere else.
It might just get you through the day.
