Making History Project – Veteran Oral History Preserving Veterans’ Stories
Technology and Preservation
While there have not been many updates lately, rest assured that I have not been idle. After having a brief and some would say inevitable computer and hard drive mishap, I have been diligently working behind the scenes upgrading equipment and taking pro active steps to ensure that all project information and digital assets are properly organized, stored, backed up, and preserved. Thankfully no project data was lost due to my redundant backup schemes. However, since preservation is the chief responsibility and obligation of an oral historian, technology failure can be unnerving regardless.
My equipment upgrade and data reorganization was a massive undertaking to say the least as it involved the full transition from a Windows platform to Apple. Given that I work with my video and audio files in Apple, the transition was an easy call to make. Executing that transition was an entirely different story. Moving all the data and taking the time to reorganize it as efficiently as possible took a lot of patience.
All of my hard drives had to be formatted to an Apple format which meant that the contents had to be copied over to another hard drive before formatting. Once the formatting was complete, all the data had to be copied back to the newly formatted hard drive and from there backups could be made. Since I changed the entire directory structure for all of my data during the reorganization so everything can be found in three clicks or less, I had to upload everything all over again to the cloud. When you are uploading terabytes of information, that takes a very long time.
Now that I am done, this project is being run on a Mac Book Pro computer that is accessing an external 8 terabyte thunderbolt RAID hard drive with matching external 4 terabyte USB hard drives as backups together with a cloud backup configuration that utilizes both Dropbox and Google Drive. I can finally breathe again and it is time to have some fun. Let’s get that camera and audio recorder rolling…
