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I used to look at people who studied family timelines as sad loners in life with nothing to do. Why would you want to see who was your great great grand Mother? It doesn't matter any more since they're long gone and you'll never meet them and they probably wouldn't like you any way.

Sadly, all of this is beginning to change for me. It started with a diary. Why would I want to look back at things I did 3-4 years ago? It turns out that it's very interesting. I made small notes about weirdos I met, who later on become my best friends. It's interesting to see how my perception of life changes and how stupid some of the things I used to do were. I cringe at the things I used to do, especially if they remind me of certain people's actions now. It suddenly knocks any sense of superiority I have when I realise that I was just like them before I became really cold and cynical in 2007 (About the same time as I signed up to youtube, which I recall calling 'childish and silly' back in my 2006 diary).

It's become even worse now. I've always wanted to keep a backup, but I'm terrible at organising things. JUST LOOK AT MY ROOM! Any way, after reformatting for the 100th time and losing everything I made from that period, I decided to change that. I think it was in Easter 2009 that I turned my room upside down in search of old CDs with valuable information on. That's another thing- I love everything else being messy while I organise something, it feels like finding a diamond amongst the mud.

But that's besides the point. I discovered several CDs, dating back to 2002. There's nothing quite as satisfying as finding something you made so long ago, replacing those distant memories you have of it with brand new, crystal clear versions of the same thing. I went through everything I could find, putting it all in one large folder. But that wasn't enough. My greed drew me to all of the external hard drives in the house. I attacked them all, stripping them from their valuable data. I found games I had made from 7 years ago. My best discoveries were screenshots from Counter Strike Source from way back in 2005. Good memories. I then attacked my poor old laptop, getting maps I had made while on holidays in the New Forest in 2005. I retrieved those saves from Thief 3, from the infamous Cradle level. (I managed to do the whole level, only to be told that I had to go back in and collect something else. No chance!).

But there were still gaps in my archive. Fairly recent movies and maps I had made were being held hostage on a failed external harddrive of mine. I dreamed of seeing all of these things again, but it was going to be hard. The hard drive in question happened to be encased in an aluminium Porsche external hard drive. There was no way I was going to penetrate this with my screw driver, and all of the screws had been damaged to prevent anybody from undoing it. I attacked the plastic casing at the front and back, then prised open the metal bars preventing access. It was half an hour of hard work, but I enjoyed it as much as a cannibal would enjoy extracting brain from a skull via a straw. Eventually, after half an hour of stabbing, I got what I needed and was able to hook the hard drive up with my computer.

My backup was complete. All of a sudden my life felt worthwhile. But there was a bigger problem - keeping it backed up. I don't trust hard drives. I've never had one fail on me, but I didn't want to take any chances, since I had all my eggs in one basket. I bought more hard drives. I backed the same information up on 3 different hard drives, then dispersed them amongst all of the computers in our house. But this caused another problem - I was constantly making new stuff. How could I possibly keep them up up to date?

After months of different methods, I settled for two.

1) The clever way - I made another folder where I placed all of the new stuff. I then put all of this on a flash drive, and went about, updating all of the computers in the house. This worked for a while, but it became silly, since while I was at University I constantly updated my PC, but was unable to keep the others up to date.

2) The brute force, Nvidia way - I got an up to date backup and copied and pasted it over an older version of the backup.

The second method eventually won, since the first was just too much hard work. I know there are about 10000 problems with the second method, but to be honest I don't give a damn. I'll end up refining it, making two folders for things that constantly need backed up and another for things that don't, and I'll use different methods of backing up for both. Or I could just end up using RAID, but that in itself is complicated and it doesn't protect it against fire. Plus I can't be bothered. It's a problem.

...And that just about brings us up to date. I realise that I am an archive freak. It's influenced everything I do. I love things being up to date. I love keeping things tidy at McDonalds, I like having a definitive tutorial list on youtube, and I love Google for its world map and future plans. My dream job would probably be working in an archive some where, or backing up computer stuff for a large company. Until then, I'm just going to have to settle with organising my parent's massive photo collection. Then I might start on my family tree.