Hey! I’ve written a digital journal for the last couple of years. Backup there wasn’t a problem. But I struggled with finding the „perfect tool“ and switched from app to app and back until I just took a notebook and a fountain pen and started writing couple of months ago.
My question now is: what’s a good way to achieve and protect a full journal physically and what’s your personal backup strategy to back up your journal in a digital way so that you still have your memories in case of your house burning down or another catastrophic event.
Thank you in advance!
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I’ve made a system of using Plotter ring journals a week at time and then running them through my scansnap into Keep It on my Mac. Keep It uses the native Apple handwriting recognition, which is shockingly quite good. Then I clip them together and put them into a monthly accordion file made for storing canceled checks. Works really well for me!
Nice - way more organized than my ‘system’. I stripped the cover off a generic set of A6 binder rings, attached them to a more solid cover that my leather binder will hold effectively, and go in weekly or so to pull out used pages/refill blanks. The written ones go in a literal box, always on top with the punched side facing a given direction, which keeps them chronological.
What it does not do is offer any kind of backup, or OCR/search function if I’ve no idea when I wrote something that I need to track down.
What systems I have are all consistently evolving on the fly, mostly slowly.
I feel like those who write journals need to be familiar with rewriting.
My main, ephemeral journal, that I carry with me is just information I’m thinking about today, and is at most relevant within the past month or so. If I know that information is more important, I copy it out into a longer-term journal.
Anything that deserves more long-term protection is a manual rewriting process.
This idea pleases the collector in me.
Also an interesting way to journal. However I did a similar method in the beginning but figured out it’s not what feels natural for myself. I just dump my brain into my journal and want to keep everything of it because I see my thoughts as equally important even if you could categorize them after how useful they may be and so on
I have sometimes toyed with the idea of buying a fire- and waterproof container for my finished journals. They are the most irreplacable objects that I value.
Does anyone have experiences with automatic handwriting recognition for digitalization?
That was one idea I had for my journal, too. However I figured out that there is not really a viable solution yet.
I was going to rewrite my handwritten journal into a journal app but gave up pretty quickly - my early journal was written during a pretty stressful time and reliving it was fairly unpleasant so I quit after getting the first month or two (re)written. Knowing that I had a major burnout coming up in the following journal made me realise that I don’t actually want to go back to those times, so I think if I decide to have another go at backing things up, I’ll just be scanning the pages to create digital copies, without having to read them.
Since you’ve already gone down the fountain pen rabbit hole, you could also take a look at “archival quality” or “water proof” inks. Many other inks can fade or be washed away, so even though you may love your J. Herbin Bleu Pervence, it might not be the kind of ink that lasts decades.
