I was recently looking for an article which I know I’ve read in the past 30 days. I’ve used anything which was at hand – browser history, Google Web History, software to download data, software to check the history of the browser, other utilities. I ended by having an Excel with 90,000+ entries, after duplicates were removed, representing URLs and titles of the web sites I opened in the past few months. I looked as quickly as you can into a file of this size, and I gave up. The link just wasn’t to be found.
Since my main problem was finding the link, the data is probably on the Internet. But I wrote this message to tell you about things which tend to “disappea” from the Internet.
If you have a favorite clip, if you especially like an article, if you find something which moves you, a good option would be to save that data.
Some clips get deleted, blogs tend to close at times, web sites either change or restructure, or move things. Your safest bet? Save your data.
There are solution through which you can download things from the Internet. A simple search for “how do I download from …” will present you information on how to download data from a specific web site.
Thus, all there is generally required is the idea that you want to save something, and you should be able to do so easily. You can easily save photos, copy articles to the PCs, and have archives for the long run.
Think about the satisfaction you’ll have, three years later, when you will want to read an article which at that time won’t be on the Internet anymore, and you will have it in your PC.
I find Evernote quite useful for saving interesting content in a orderly manner :)
Great tip, thanks!