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Marc Robbins's avatar

I'd love to hear some good discussion about "future proofing" technology, especially written records. What is the possibility that those living in the far future -- say 500 years -- look back at our time as a kind of "Dark Ages" where there are few written records of anything? They might recognize that the moldering hunks of silicon represented *some* kind of records but they are forever prevented from figuring out what they contain. Or to put it another way, will those in the year 2500 find those writing in the year 1500 spoke to them more clearly than those in 2022? For that matter, what records recorded electronically in, say, 1980 are no longer accessible to us and are now lost forever?

All I know is that I will carefully preserve my paper copies of the Atlantic, perhaps burying them in the yard, for the benefit of future archaeologists.

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David Berreby's avatar

I have immense respect for Tinderbox and for Mark Bernstein, but day-to-day for working with ideas and information, finding themes and serendipitous connections, I find myself using Obsidian. Alone it's pretty bare-bones but it has hundreds of "plug-ins" (almost all free) which allow you to set up tagging, linking and data handling in ways that make sense to you.

It's all based on Markdown which means it's easy to get at your notes from the Finder (I use the Mac and iOS versions). It also means your stuff is on your own computer (even if you use one of the easy sync options). For me it has been a Scrivener or DevontThink level experience to move work into it. Maybe worth a look for you?

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