So, it seems that, quite unexpectedly and late in life, I am going to become a father for the first time. Should be interesting.
My digital life has been, to this point, quite scattered across all kinds of different hard disks, cloud drives and NAS. It’s been difficult to find what I want to, and it’s been OK for me, but… now with this new person showing up, I wanted to start fresh with a system that could house all the data I wanted to keep which someone else could also use, including, but not limited to:
- official documents
- silly things the kid will say
- information about his/her ancestors
- audio clips of his grandparents speaking (they have all passed but one, so it’s what I’ve got)
- journal entries I will write about how I feel with regard to parenting
- All the crayon drawings and miscellany the kid will produce that we won’t have space to keep any other way
- etc.
Basically, I know throughout my life, I’ve wanted to have so much more information about me and my family and elders and stories and things, and all the things I created that are now gone forever because it just couldn’t be kept, and I never got that. I want that for my kid, if I can offer it. These days, all the data you can keep is available, but it’s super hard (at least for me) to keep track of it all, which is the main reason I came to DEVONThink. I’ve been ghosting the software for years, but couldn’t really come up with a compelling use case before now. This was what pushed me to purchase, and I hope it’ll help me with this.
Another reason is that I absolutely DON’T want to live this kid’s life out on social media as is currently ‘de rigueur’. I want this kid to not have his past sneak up on him because I posted it somewhere thinking it cute. At the same time, I DO want to capture it all in a way that will work.
So, I bought it, and I installed it, and I’m a little scared of it already. Last night, I was sitting there with a picture of my grandfather, the kid’s great grandfather. I put it into DT, and I wanted to attach a note to the picture, just to identify the man in something more than a file name, and I couldn’t figure out how to link a text file to the image.
Seems I have a long, long way to go. I hope this gets easier, or it’ll just become yet another mess of data.
Anyway, I’m hopeful that maybe someone can offer up a thought or two about how to best get on with this, or if I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Thanks so much for reading.