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Irrational fear? Data loss
aarondesk | Aug 22 2007
I have this fear of data loss. I fear that someday the proprietary software I use will store my data/lists in some format that will be unreadable by future software. There's so many apps out there (Evernote, wikis, GTD software galore, etc.) that have proprietary formats but I hesitate to use any of them. I keep my lists for the most part in txt files that are backed up nightly. I'm fairly confident txt will be readable for the next 50 years. I keep a paper notebook for notes, but I don't maintain my NA lists in it because if I were to lose the notebook, that would be a catastrophe. Am I being irrational? Aaron 7 Comments
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 Am I being irrational? I would...Submitted by jason.mcbrayer on August 23, 2007 - 3:51am.
aarondesk;10101 wrote:
I would say absolutely not. Undocumented/unrecoverable binary formats are one of the main reasons I won't use any proprietary software unless a job requires it. My GTD system is also plain-text based, using Free Software (emacs org-mode) to impose a layer of structure on text documents. That said, if you're interested in using a particular product and are worried about its save format, you might check if it may be saving as XML, or if it can export to XML, both of which features are fairly common today. Or, as scottw says, export to CSV or another structured text format. » POSTED IN:
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