So much of our work happens in the digital realm! In some way or another computers have found their way in to our daily lives at work and at home.
In the ether of this digital world we can keep a lot of information and we can find a lot of information, but we can also lose (or misplace) some very important information.
To tackle this issue of managing your digital domain I'm going to take you on a broad strokes overview of how you can approach setting up your workflow to avoid many pitfalls of today's digital landscape.
Workflow
At its core we're thinking about the workflows of a digital age.
In regard to constraints of location and the ability to copy and manipulate information, we can see there is great freedom in the digital domain.
However, we are constrained by our physical interfaces to this world, such as personal computers and smartphones.
How then can we work so as to take the best advantage of this reality of a our day and age?
Location must not matter
A key tenet of the digital native and a core maxim of creating an effective workflow in a digital age, *Location must not matter* emphasises the importance of mitigating the impact of limited physical access to the digital domain.
This concern covers both the concepts of data, the representation of information in our digital world and software, the processes by which we leverage and manipulate data.
Saving and loading your work
A key concern in the management of data is storing it so you can access it in the future. From a physical perspective we have to address concerns such as the resilience, capacity, and accessibility of the storage medium. In the digital realm we must contend with concerns such as finding our data again and the security controlling who may access our data.
The key to solving issues of resilience is redundancy. As copying data is easy, ensuring there are multiple copies of your data on multiple devices and in multiple geographic locations ensures that your data will be retrievable, even after a substantial disaster.
However there is a danger lurking in replicating data, what happens if your data becomes corrupted? Will these imperfections be replicated and overwrite all other copies? This is where techniques like versioning come into their own. The concept behind versioning is that rather than just overwriting old data we instead save a copy of it, creating a version of our data which precedes the current version. By utilising a technique like versioning we can manage the dangers of replicating errors to copies of our data.
Accessibility relates directly to the *Location must not matter* mindset. While it may appear to be an easy solution, "Just store it online", this may not be as helpful as it first might appear, don't put all your eggs in one basket! While it is increasingly easy to connect to the internet there are still many times when that isn't an option, so having a solution where you can access a copy while offline can be important to consider.
In addition to the question of offline and online access we must also consider what software we require to work with our data. A major advantage of freely distributed software is the ability to install it wherever we need to use it. Unfortunately commercial software licenses are quite varied in the restrictions they place on how many installations of a product you may have installed or use at any one time. To solve issues of accessibility we can look to synchronisation solutions and in some cases distributed versioning systems.
In making our information accessible we must also consider how secure our information is. The major piece of advice to remember here is that it is near impossible to ensure (if not simply impossible) to store data in a completely secure manner. With that out of the way though it is certainly possible to make it very hard for someone to access data without your authorisation. What we can learn from this is that you should never store valuable data without securing it in such a way that it is more effort than it is worth to gain unauthorised access.
Typically our reason for storing data is to retrieve it again at some later point. Organising your data so it can be found again is important and should be done early rather than later. While our personal computers have provided us with a hierarchy of files and folders this may not always be the best or only approach. Consider that many online platforms allow you to add tags to objects so they can be found via association instead of via a hierarchy. On the topic of retrieval, test your backups! Although its great if you're synchronising your data to backups across the world if you don't know how to get it back when you need it those backups are effectively worthless.
Automation
While we might all have great plans as to how we're going to make copies of all our data, we are often our own worst enemies when it comes to routine tasks such as backing up our data. To solve this laziness we must ensure that we automate as much as we can. This can be in the form of scheduling backups or synchronising our changes as they happen, the simpler the system is to use for day to day tasks the better. But remember that automation with the best of intentions will simply do as it's told, which may not always be what you intended! As above you really should keep versions of your data (this should be automated too) at least then you can backtrack if something goes wrong.
What we have covered
Use tools available to make life in a digital reality easier, keep backups, lots of backups as they are cheap and effective. Keep previous versions of your backups, it too is comparably cheap to losing your data. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket, you want both online and online access. Most important of all make sure you can find your data when you need it!
Sam Gillespie is a postgraduate research student at the university of New South Wales.
Sam Gillespie's previous articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/sam-gillespie.html