Defragmenting my online life
Older operating systems would just save files on a spinning hard drive any where there was space. Sometimes, large files would be split up and the segments scattered all over the drive. If this file fragmentation became bad enough, then it could hurt your system’s performance. If that happened, you’d run a utility to defragment your hard drive and reassemble those scattered files.
Well, I’m in the process of defragmenting my digital life. Since 2022, pretty much everything I’ve written or shared is here on bobwertz.com. But before 2022, my posts and images are scattered across the web on different sites and services. I want to have them in one place. Thanks to Micro.Blog’s import features, I already have a full archive of my Twitter posts and have moved more than 1,400 images over to this site from Instagram. I’ve been working on manually migrating my Sketchbook B blog posts to this site as well. I still need to figure out how to import Facebook posts, but I already have the assets downloaded.
So many people view online posting as ephemeral, but I’ve always viewed my online posts as permanent. Each is something that I intentionally wanted to share and remember. Once I finish the process of gathering everything, I’ll have a single, reasonably complete collection of my online life since December 2007 when I joined Twitter. I don’t really expect others to join me on this defragmentation journey. It’s a time consuming process. However, if you care about the stuff you’ve posted over the last few decades, you might want to start thinking about how to archive and preserve what you’ve shared.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.