Every six months or so, I look at the bins of antique computing hardware stored in the basement, and wonder whether I should continue to keep them, or pull the pin and recycle everything after wiping the drives. Then I stumble on an article like this one from the Harvard Law Library, and I feel better about having kept everything.

With digital storage there will always be two separate but equal battlefields of maintenance to consider: maintenance of the digital holdings and software environments in which they live, and the simple physical maintenance of the hardware and architecture that contain them.

It’s a really well-written and well-designed article, and worth reading if you nerd out on stuff like this. Now, to think about a secondary data backup for the server in the basement.