Vanishing acts

Call me a Luddite, a technophobe, stuck in the past - but the deliberate mass deletion of photos by Flickr and the supposedly accidental loss of images, videos and audio files from MySpace only confirm my fears about the folly of trusting companies to keep things safe and secure online and in the cloud. It's already the source of some annoyance to me that all but the last post on Black & White & Read All Over, the football blog I co-ran for very nearly ten years, seems to have evaporated into the ether.

All the more reason to ensure that everything is backed up and accessible - though I also worry about the pace of technological development and certain electronic formats falling into obsolescence. Not that preserving things physically is a failsafe solution, however - I might still own a cassette player but many (perhaps most) of my tapes are likely too degraded to be either saved or enjoyed. The mere thought that a sizeable swathe of my music collection is disappearing or has already disappeared makes me feel nauseous.