The dangers of going fully digital

Digital files are very fragile. It's surprisingly easy to lose a file, whether through accidental deletion or a sudden drive failure. I've seen it happen countless times, which is why I think it's crucial to discuss the downsides of going fully digital.

When you switch to digital, it's not just about scanning your documents and calling it a day. It requires a shift in mindset. Instead of worrying about where your paper documents are, you'll need to focus on keeping your digital files safe and managing multiple backups. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Let's explore the key disadvantages of going fully digital, here are the key points:

(If you prefer to watch rather than read, here is the link to the video)

(More & more) Reliance on Technology

Devices can fail and power outages can occur, leading to loss of access to important documents.

All of a sudden when you digitise your documents you no longer worry about the whereabouts of the physical copies of your paper documents but you start worrying about where your digital files are - in case of a power outage you can lose access to them so you start continuously thinking about how to backup, where your backups are, are they synchronised?

To solve this problem there's a very classic maybe even old approach that digital photographers follow.

This is the 3-2-1 rule.

One solution (for backups): the 3-2-1 rule

You have to keep

• three copies of every single file you create digitally
• in two formats - which in our case of a digital document could be a PDF file and a simple image file, a photo of the document, and
• out of these three copies try to keep one off-site, which means geographically far away from where you live.

This last one is probably already solved - if you upload your files to the cloud - in two ways

• the "cloud" is a data centre probably far away from where you live, and
• behind the scenes cloud providers also replicate the files and copying them across multiple data centres for the very reason of avoiding losing these digital copies.

Digital preservation

A very interesting problem domain is digital preservation. Over time technology evolves so if you want to keep your files available and accessible for a long period of time, for years or even for decades you have to follow the evolving technological landscape.

A very classic example: a couple of decades ago we used to have floppy disks - very fragile pieces of kit - keeping your precious digital files on them. As soon as hard drives became available and became cheaper people started copying them across to hard drives. Then optical drives came along, DVDs and CDs, so people started migrating their files to them. (It is still considered a very good way of preserving your documents for a long long period of time, they have proven to be a good format. Then solid state drives arrived and they became cheaper and cheaper and although not fully proven how long they can preserve data (yet) they are more reliable and more stable. People, again started copying their files across.

This continuous copying of files is one aspect of digital preservation.

The other one is all about the various file formats: it's not just the hardware technology that is evolving, but also the software and the various file formats as well.

Tech-savvy barriers

The problem here is if you are the only one in your family who does the digitisation exercise and you know where your files are but the rest of your family does not know much about it.

One solution (to share knowledge): educate your family members

Share this knowledge you have: educate your family, your kids at least on the aspect of where these files are, how to search them.

Maybe the digitisation part relies on your presence but everything else can and should be shared among family members.

Digital security

In our case of going paperless let's just imagine the following scenario:

• most of your documents very likely have your physical address printed on them. You definitely don't want to expose it publicly, you don't want it to get leaked on onto the internet, so you have to keep your files in a secure place.

One solution (to keep your files secure): strong, unique passwords & multi-factor authentication

If you really want to keep security as your highest priority then you have to encrypt your files before uploading them to the cloud - before backing them up.

For those of you who don't want to spend the time and effort on security but still think it's an important factor the very basic level of digital security is to

• keep unique and strong passwords, and
• use multi-factor authentication.

Please don't get discouraged by the above items, just keep in mind that you have to tackle these four.

Happy digitisation!