Impermanence

Gary Allen, author of the ifo Apple Store blog, traveled the world visiting Apple stores, a unique hobby for sure. I had never heard of him until I read this article about his passing. John Gruber at Daring Fireball wrote about this and the issue of what happens to someone’s online writing when that person dies.

How do we protect electronic works in a way that makes them truly durable? Even considering backups, a succession plan, choosing a platform without lock-in, not relying on sketchy cloud providers (geez, the list goes on and on…), this remains a big problem. The effort it takes to anticipate the things that can go wrong and follow a plan to preserve content is not trivial. No matter how far you take it, you can always come up with yet another scenario that can wreck your stuff.

Electronic things are ephemeral. The ease with which we can create something seems almost proportional to how easy it is to lose it.

Categories    Apple