Record keeping advice

[Kevin C]

Having a book is all very well and good, but to all the people who use this method only, do you have a back-up copy in case of fire, flood, theft or accidentaly being eaten by the dog or thrown out with the rubbish?

An electronic copy can be saved into various formats as things progress and change. Just because technology changes doesn't mean something is going to become obsolete. There is always a method of preserving data and converting to a new medium - I believe 'The Bible' is quite an old publication and that's still readable (apparently).

Having said all that, the thought of having numerous volumes of old hand written sighting records to view in 50 years time is a lovely idea, just not with my handwriting!

[pvaz]

Honestly? I think I can keep physical items, like a CD with files burnt onto it, for a decade. I think that if I opt to always copy all my files across to a new drive or computer I can keep computer files on my own systems for a decade. I'm not so confident Dropbox, or even Google, will still be around in 2022. They're very useful services for backup, and for syncing multiple PCs, but I'd be deeply wary of using them for long-term archiving.

Well you keep a copy on each of your device so your mistrust for the service should not bother you. I'm a computer engineer and 2 guys who graduated with me are currently working for google in the US. I can assure you their data centers can make many financial institutions jealous. They have the best on servers and backup systems. It's much more likely to have my house destroid with a natural disaster, along with all my processions then to loose my cloud hosted files.

Besides digital data can be replicated easily in physical form. All you need is a cheap printer.

[MarkSix]

Take a look at astroplanner its really a nice tool.