Old notes

[cdave]

Bit late for a What I Did At The Weekend (Went to Caption (Oxford small press comics convention) on Saturday, and down south to visit parental units on the Sunday) post, but one of the things I did was clear some of my junk out of a parental loft.

[Poll #1446736]

I found that I had 3 cardboard boxes of "school stuff" and 2 plastic crates of "University stuff". I didn't have much time to go through it, but managed to sling a few bits (such as all my sixth form era invites to University open days). While I do like the odd doodle in the margin, and in joke scrawled on the cover of a notebook, I'm really not sure I need to keep quite this volume of stuff.

Given that I haven't looked at it in years, and am unlikely to do so in the near future, I probably should just sling most of it. But it's so final. This stuff, as useless as it is, is literally irreplaceable. I managed to avoid picking up a "bargin" in IKEA the other day on the basis that I'd rather pay full price when I need it, than hang onto something that just takes up space. But this stuff is my own hand.

Comments

[emmajking.livejournal.com]

I have all my physics/maths notes that could be in any way relevant, even though everything that's in them is also in the text books I have, in a more legible and coherent manner, basically because I don't like throwing stuff out and felt I had a half-way legitimate excuse for keeping those. I threw out all my Chemistry notes, though! ;) And I have a few bits and pieces of random stuff all the way back to primary school.

Never throw anything away, ever - you'll only regret it! That's my motto (and the reason I need a 4-bedroom house with double garage to fit all my junk in....)

If you really, really want to reclaim the space, you could start a mammoth scanning mission, and then keep it all electronically....?

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

My plan is to photograph the doodles, and then recycle the rest for any of my old stuff I find while sorting through boxes ... convention flyers and such I intend to scan (or at least photograph) before doing likewise ... I have "inherited" half a dozen boxes of convention publications (the remains of the Memory Hole Annexe I believe) and that's probably a project for next year!

[cdave]

As much as I hate to add to your clutter habbit, I think that paper trumps electrons for casual long term archiving. You need to practice very good back-up regimes, including regular movement of old data, as much electronic media don't last for more than a quarter of a century.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

The doodles have survived unviewed for however long and really should just be thrown out, the digital copy is just a short term echo (and could always be printed off if I wanted a paper copy again) ...

... the idea of the scanning of old convention flyers etc. is to make them available for historical/searching purposes ... I do not intend to be a research library for those ... PRs and Programme books on the other hand I'll try to keep a paper copy as long as I can (or pass it on to a longer term archive if the Foundation or similar is interested).

You're right of course, but I really do need to declutter (and there is a company selling special "DVD_Rs" (need a special writer but read in a normal reader) that claim a 1,000 year readable lifespan ... but I'm not planning on buying one of those ... I do try to keep at least two copies (on different hard disks) plus a DVD+R copy of all my important files (e.g. my photographs, word documents, backups of my websites, my email archive etc.) and every few years I copy it all again onto larger backup drives (my backup drives a few years back were 120Gb or smaller, then are now 320Gb or 500Gb drives, but then currently attached at home I have a 1Tb, a 750Gb and a 300Gb external drive (750Gb is my music drive, 300Gb is my TV drive and is FULL ... 1Tb drive is all sorts of stuff including the music and TV that won't fit on the other drives!) ... the stack of Toshiba external drives are currently awaiting unpacking from my trip back from Cambridge (five drives of 320 to 500Gb) ... I figure the TV stuff can be downloaded again, ditto a lot of the music, so it's really the rare stuff plus my own documents and images of the main C drives that need to be backed up regularly)

[cdave]

"Never throw anything away, ever - you'll only regret it! That's my motto (and the reason I need a 4-bedroom house with double garage to fit all my junk in....)"

I could never afford that in London. So it comes down to how much it's worth it. I'm no longer buying bargains, and storing in case of need. I'd rather pay full price when I do need something.

Plus having a brief flick through it, I'm fairly sure I feel no strong emotional connection to the old dry notes (silly stuff aside), and can't really imagine I'll ever want to do an analysis of what I wrote compared to the Youth of today.

That said, if I had the space, I would hang on to it.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Throw it away, perhaps retaining a few pages of special significance (where you did a doodle exchange with the cute girl next to you, where you did a caricature of your lecturer, or that funny spider diagram!)

I have a 3 bed house in London with an extended garage and conservatory, plus four storage units ... I can't afford that either! So I am decluttering.

Stuff will be available on LJ-Cycle soon!

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

"I could never afford that in London."

Yes you could. You just don't like the area it'd be in!

[cdave]

That's true actually.

Hmm.