Monthly Archives: October 2011

revisiting email retention

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I have an archive copy of just about every email I’ve sent or received since about 1996, and certainly haven’t deleted an email since 1998 – not even the spam.  Many people know this – and many colleagues do something similar.

I suppose I have two reasons for doing this:

  • trawling the archives is occasionally useful (for finding information, or confirming what someone said, or being reminded what I said); because just about all of my work is eventually mediated (in and out) by email, the mailbox archive plays the role of a professional journal.
  • the process of filing and deciding what to retain and what to delete is insanely time-consuming, and easily costs more than the now insanely cheap cost of disc storage and associated backups.
This approach actually extends beyond email – I haven’t really deleted a file in a decade or so.

Lost Treasures

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Some say computer science rediscovers old ideas every twenty years or so. Justin mentioned it last week in the context of explicit vs implicit information flows. I was reminded again today when I saw a call for papers from IEEE Security & Privacy titled ‘Lost Treasures of Computer Security & Privacy’ [http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/spcfp6] for a special issue next year. The list of topics the editors seek makes for fascinating reading, but I wish to note a different, practical reason.

When tracking down a reference a few months ago, I ran into an example of what librarians call a ‘black hole’ or ‘dark age’: periods of history inaccessible due to changing technology. The document I was looking for contains hearings before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Small Business, 85th Congress, in 1957. But when I went to that room in the regional depository library, all I found were pieces of shelving on the floor. The microform collection is being digitised and decades of microfilm are ‘temporarily unavailable’, where temporary may mean upwards of a year or more.

What other instances of forgotten lore have you personally encountered?