Unification

I really am quite blessed.

I find that when I tithe regularly, my coffers fill to overflowing, or at least enough for me to experience abundant living, and have enough still to share! Praise the Lord!

There are so many good things I am thankful for… I just wanted to share that fact.

I am writing to tell about a dream, a goal.

I’ve been online, starting with classic Compuserve, since 1993. I know there are some who were on longer than that, some of those people are the one’s who defined the places that we others all go to. All went to.

My friends and I were actually participating in local BBS (bulletin board services) since before that, but at that point, “being online” was about connecting to a server. Compuserve in ’93, for me, was about an online presence. About “being there”, being an entity in an online environment.

Those were wonderful, heady days for me. I had a fast Mac, one of the fastest (Q800), and could do things online that PC users could only marvel at. This too, helped establish my sense of online identity.

It is a blurry precognition of who I am online today.

In any event, I am a digital packrat. I keep just about every electronic file I download, upload, type, or simply come across. At work, right now, I have over 10,000 email in my GroupWise archive. I have actually some 6GB of email and attachments.

This trait was no different in the beginning than it is now.

I’ve had three connected personal computers, counting this laptop. I also had a C64, and a VIC20. And a TimexSinclair (ZX81?). But, those systems didn’t network well, if at all, and certainly not by today’s standards, certainly not well enough to allow for the sense of presence online.

However, there are the three modern Mac systems I have owned. Then there’s at least eight or nine more computers, mostly Macs, some PCs, that I’ve operated or time-shared on over the last 11 years.

And each terminal I log in through, I generate another slice of my digital life. I pack more digital rats.

Enter the “Data Unification Project”.

With the advent of high capacity and reasonably portable digital storage systems, I have set a goal to reconcile my entire digital life onto one storage system. One single computer. Or at least, one single collection of DVDs.

I made my first purchase off of eBay two weeks ago. It was a 230DynaMO drive. My 230MO had died, leaving the 15 or so MO cartridges I had sitting in a box someplace collecting dust. With the newly acquired drive, I have copied all the data from the MOdisks onto my laptop hard drive.

Not just that. Pretty much every SCSI drive I’ve ever stored anything on has been or will soon be dumped onto my laptop.

The best news came tonight. My previous Mac system had a 4Gb Seagate Barracuda II (ST15150N) drive, with 8 partitions. Back in 2000-2001 or so, I had started trying to gather and organize my data on that drive, anticipating copying it to CDs. Then, my logic board failed (I had one of the PM7200 series with weak solder joints on the video port. One day, I turned it on, it arched across several gaps, and fried the video component). So I stopped using the machine. Stopped using the harddrive.

Roughly four years later, I was trying to connect it to a borrowed PowerMac system through an external drive mechanism. And it was failing.

But, I was blessed with a solution. I plugged it into the internal bus and BOOM BABY it mounted, all eight partitions, and in a matter of an hour or so, I was able to copy all of it over to my laptop too!

I am soo blessed! Really!