I’ve been journaling all my life, beginning with a Ramona Quimby fill-in-the-blanks diary when I was six. Soon I had progressed to Meade college-ruled notebooks, and as a young adult, my series of notebooks became essentially my closest friend. I poured my heart and soul into them—all my heartaches, my random thoughts about life, my secret crushes, my tirades about being wronged, my fantasies about becoming someone better.
By now, whenever I walk through the office supplies section of a grocery store, I get a happy thrill upon seeing all the blank spiral-bound notebooks. Sometimes I flip through them just for fun. They’re so inviting! Just holding one makes my hand itch to write.
And not only writing in my journals but reading back through them has been therapeutic. Looking through what I wrote years earlier always gives me new insights about myself. I’m often surprised at how little I remember of my past—there are invariably events and scenes in my journals that I would have completely forgotten if not for having written them down. There are also many things I have completely forgotten and that I’m glad to have recorded. And many of the memories have warped in my mind since they happened, so that reading my journals provides a corrective record.
In my twenties, I became fearful of losing all the precious journal-filled notebooks I had accumulated over the years. I lived in shared housing and needed to store them in boxes in basements and storage rooms, and I shuddered to think about fires and floods. The older I became, the more it felt like my journals were a part of me, integrated into my brain. Losing them would be like having part of my memory wiped, or like losing a treasured friend: the voice, questions, and wisdom of my former, younger self. It would also be catastrophic to my work as a memoir writer.
So in my thirties I finally digitized all my journals, keeping the hard copies but also creating password-protected digital files that I store in multiple places. Now, if the worst ever happens, these most precious possessions won’t be lost. It gives me such immense peace of mind.
The digitizing process took money and time, and it would have been cheaper and quicker if I’d known what I was doing from the beginning. So I’ve written this post to explain my method, so that others might be able to tackle this kind of project more easily.
There are many other online articles (e.g., here) about digitizing your papers, journals, and other important items. Many of them may be more up-to-date than this one. But this is what I did, and once I figured my method out, it became easy and straightforward—so I recommend it as one good option for others.
A note about notebooks
As I mentioned, most of my journals over the years have been spiral-bound notebooks. It turns out these are by far the easiest notebooks to digitize, because their spiral binding can be easily unbound and rebound. Once I discovered this, I began using exclusively spiral-bound notebooks for journaling, to make digitizing easier whenever I filled up another notebook.
Notebooks with other bindings can be digitized too, and I’ve done so with the few of mine that weren’t spiral-bound. But this typically involves either painstakingly scanning every page individually, which is prohibitively time-consuming, or destroying the notebook by cutting off the binding so the pages can be fed through a scanner. The latter was the option I chose; more on that below.
Finding a scanner
I had thousands of pages of journal to scan, so I needed a fast, high-quality scanner with a paper feeder. A flatbed wouldn’t do—those only scan one side of the page at a time, which would mean days or weeks of me placing individual pages on the scanner and flipping them over. A paper feeder allows you to place stacks of two-sided pages into a tray, and the scanner runs them through quickly, perhaps just requiring you to stand watching and making sure the pages stay tidy.
My local library only had flatbed scanners, and the local FedEx charged a lot ($0.49 per page) for use of its scanners. Doing the calculations, I realized that because I had at least several thousand pages to scan, it would be most cost-efficient for me to simply buy my own scanner to use at home.
I went with the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500, which has since been discontinued and replaced by the ScanSnap iX1500. I chose this model because it was highly rated as a high-quality, fast scanner with a paper feeder that could handle at least 50 sheets at a time, and indeed, it has worked perfectly in the several years since I bought it. It’s currently sold on Amazon for $518. (A great way to mitigate this cost is by finding others who might want to share the scanner with you—you can make the purchase together, then rotate the scanner between your homes.)
On bindings
Once you’ve got your scanner set up, digitizing a spiral-bound notebook is incredibly easy.
You can remove the metal binding by unpinning it from itself or clipping the wire attachment and unthreading it from the pages. (Don’t tear the pages off the binding—you want the pages’ holes intact, so you can reinsert the binding when you’re done scanning.) After you scan the notebook, you can often reinsert the metal binding you just removed, or if it’s been clipped or destroyed, you can replace it with a plastic binding coil. These are obtainable from FedEx and Amazon; my local FedEx just gives them to me for free when I ask.
Non-spiral-bound notebooks are trickier. You can leave the notebook intact and scan it on a flatbed scanner, but for me that was far too time-consuming—flatbeds take maybe 30 seconds per page, and I had hundreds of non-spiral-bound pages.
So the other option, which I chose, is to destroy the notebooks by removing their binding. I took a boxcutter or a pair of scissors and carefully carved a straightish line as close to the page edge as I could, then tore out the pages in somewhat tidy sets. They scanned just fine, and then I was left with the puzzle of how to store them. I could have punched holes in them and stored them in two- or three-ring binders, but the punched holes would have erased some of the words I’d written. I opted for the pricier option of having them professionally rebound.
Scanning & digital file storage
Before scanning a notebook, I like to write the dates of the journal somewhere on the cover, e.g., “September 1998 – October 2000.” I then make it one single PDF file, including the front and back covers so that when I open it, I get an image of the cover and it’s like I’m opening the physical journal. The dates on the cover help confirm what I’m looking at.
I label the digital file using the date and color of the notebook, sometimes also including a description of what was going on in my life at the time: “1998 Sept – 2000 Oct blue notebook (college).”
I also password protect the file.
I then store it in a few different places. I keep one copy on my computer—but that’s not my only copy, because computers can crash, and because if a fire occurred, my computer might be destroyed along with my journals. So I keep two separate backup hard drives, on which I back up my journals and all my other important files. One I store in my house separately from my computer, and the other I store at a loved one’s house. (I update both backup drives every six months or so.)
Other things I’ve digitized
My journals were my primary concern, but the process of digitizing them made me realize there were various other items I wouldn’t want to lose in a disaster. Photos and home videos were of course at the top. Briefly, here are some resources for digitizing these other items:
- For non-digital photos and home videos, I highly recommend the service Scan Cafe, which I’ve used for all of my 35 mm photos, slides, Advantix film, and VHS and VHS-C tapes.
- For cassette tapes, I followed this article to convert sound to MP3 files using a walkman and a stereo patch cord, and used the free program Audacity as the digital interface.
- For old floppy disks, I bought an external floppy disk reader, and I sent unreadable disks to FloppyDisk.com to see if they could recover any lost content.
It’s all about peace of mind.
Ultimately, my digitizing project took me much longer than I thought it would. The journals were the easy part—I had a big, three-foot-long file cabinet drawer full of them, and it probably took me something like a week or two of full-time work to finish them all. But after that, I moved on to all of Ron’s and my photos and home videos, all my grade school art and other keepsakes, cards given to me by friends and family, and college papers. Spread out over time, the project ultimately lasted a decade!
But it gives me such peace of mind. In September 2020, during the terrible fire season when even parts of Portland had to be evacuated, I felt glad we had already digitized everything just in case. And there’s always the chance the Big One will hit and we’ll have to evacuate our home for months or even years! I’m so glad we’re prepared.
Katie…
This was excellent information and I am finally going to publish my first book by June 2022, and so keeping materials from my other journals you have taught me a good lesson here!
Girl!! My first journal was that exact same Ramona Quimby journal!!! In fact I still have it right here!!! I’m getting ready to finally digitize all of my journals- I’m so happy I found you! How fun!! My mom started a journal for me the day she found out she was pregnant with me- i took over at age 8 with my Ramona diary lol and I’ve kept a journal from then on until well, yesterday! I turned 40 this year so I’ve got journals of my life from the day my mom found out she was pregnant with me until yesterday lol! I feel like it was something just built into me, memory keeping ( aka hoarding let’s just be real I’m a memory hoarder) and I think the reason is because ive had a very very ummm, interesting(????) Life? Ps I suck at grammar and editing thank goodness my bestie is a freelance editor lol I’ve already warned her that I’m going to start working on my memoir and she gets to deal with editing and formatting lol!! I really appreciate all of the great suggestions for digitizing everything… it’s a wee bit overwhelming lol!! But exciting ! Have an awesome day and I can’t wait to read more about you! And cheers to the Ramona the Great!! 😉🥰
Love – jl
My insta is : @riseupshinebe ( oops I need to double check that it might be riseupshinebeINC… but I have a pic on there of all my journals lol. It needs updated terribly. Ok have a great day!
Abenáa and Jaelle, I’m so glad this was helpful! We are kindred journaling/writing spirits. 🙂 Jaelle, that’s so cool about your Ramona journal! 😀
Thanks Katie.
My concern is that my 3 to 5-subject college (150 -300 pages) spiral bound Journals lived in backpacks. The wires got smished and fixed, but the page holes & some perforated lines separated a bit, esp. at bottoms, mostly fixed with clear tape, but there are bits of paper holes that.I worry will foul or jam ordistort pages in auto feed SnapScan ix1600 I’m inclined ($419 online).
Did you have trouble with such worn corners? Suggestions?
Hi Bill, that’s a great question. I did have a few notebooks with smashed or damaged pages that would have jammed in the scanner. With those, my solution was to spend some time carefully neatening up the pages after taking them out of the spiral bindings.
In the case of damaged, bent, or smashed pages, I could generally neaten them up with some care—unbending dogears, smoothing out wrinkled or smashed parts, etc. Clear tape also sounds like a good idea if there are tears.
If there were frayed spiral edges, I sometimes removed them with scissors. Then, after scanning those pages, I three-hole punched them, painstakingly added hole protectors, and stored them in 3-ring binders rather than re-binding them with the spiral binding. (A few words were lost when I punched the holes, which was why it was good to scan those pages before doing the hole punching.)
These processes were time-consuming, but to me they were worth it. In the end, what I’ve got is a tidy digitized version and also a much tidier physical version of each journal, making them easier to reread now. I hope this helps!
I share your love of notebooks, and have been keeping journals for over 50 years now. I have about 250 notebooks full of my writing by this point, and I’m worried that they will all be just thrown away or recycled the moment I myself pass on ! I don’t want that to happen, since I have unpublished poetry and lots of essays and family history research in them. I’m thinking of buy an iPhone and just using the scan function that comes with them, but I have no idea how long that will take (since I have almost 40,000 to scan ! ), and I also have NO idea how to organize all those digital files (and I’m nearly 70 years old now, and not good with computers). I’m kind of worried about even attempting this huge project, but it WOULD give me a lot of peace of mind (as you say) having these things safely stored somewhere. (I’m on Facebook under the name Carl M. Cole).
I share your love of notebooks, and have been keeping journals for over 50 years now. I have about 250 notebooks full of my writing by this point, and I’m worried that they will all be just thrown away or recycled the moment I myself pass on ! I don’t want that to happen, since I have unpublished poetry and lots of essays and family history research in them. I’m thinking of buy an iPhone and just using the scan function that comes with them, but I have no idea how long that will take (since I have almost 40,000 to scan ! ), and I also have NO idea how to organize all those digital files (and I’m nearly 70 years old now, and not good with computers). I’m kind of worried about even attempting this huge project, but it WOULD give me a lot of peace of mind (as you say) having these things safely stored somewhere. (I’m on Facebook under the name Carl M. Cole).
Hi Carl – Thanks so much for this comment, and I really feel for you. I share your desire to have your writings live on after you are gone!
I highly recommend that, especially if your notebooks are spiral-bound, instead of purchasing an iPhone and scanning these files by hand, you purchase a digital scanner that can handle 50 to 100 pages at once. It would be much faster to feed the pages in the way I did than to scan tens of thousands of pages individually. (Besides, these days, digital scanners are generally cheaper than iPhones!) It will still take you weeks of work, but hopefully, if you are 70, you have been able to retire and have some time for this important project.
In terms of organization, at the very least, you could organize the scanned files the way they are currently organized: by notebook. Digital scanners allow you to scan multiple pages into one PDF file. You could start a new PDF with each new notebook, and click “Save” when you’ve finished scanning that notebook. You would wind up with 250 digital files.
Along the way, if/when you encounter writings that are especially important, you could mark those pages (I use post-its) and rescan them a second time into a file labeled “important” or “poems” or whatever you want. It’s a very good idea to take the time to curate your writings yourself, if you feel that there are gems in there. I suspect that, in your case as well as mine, others will not have the patience or perseverance to read through all of our copious writings looking for the gems! So I’m trying to do that myself before I die, in hopes that the gems, at least, will be preserved for a while. 🙂
Finally, on your being intimidated by this project: If you have the means, it might be worth hiring someone to help you. One website, http://www.taskrabbit.com, is good for finding people to do odd jobs like this. You might also know someone (a young person?) who is good at file organization and good with computers. If you have lots of money, you could pay someone to do the whole project, scanning and all—but that would likely cost thousands of dollars. Or you could spend much less than that for just a few hours of someone’s time. They could help you figure out how to do the scanning and how to organize the scanned files.
I hope this helps!
Thanks, Katie ! Maybe you’re right. Taking thousands of pictures does sound like a time consuming pain in the **** ! Most of my notebooks are wired spiral bound ones. I can see how you could “unwire” them, but how do you put the wire back through all the pages after you’ve scanned them ? That sounds tricky. ( I’m not at all good at doing craft projects or anything like that by hand). How did you do it ? When people suggested to me in the past that I should just “scan” all of these journals I was thinking of a flatbed scanner where you have to scan one page at a time, and I thought “No way ! That would take YEARS to do all that !” But your talking about a scanner that can be “fed” fifty pages or something. That would work ! Do you have any recommendations about a good one to get ?
Oh, and by the way, I’m not 70 yet, but I’m getting there. I’m 67. ( You were making me feel older than I am. Ha ! It’s fine).
Oh, and I forgot to ask you : Once you’ve got all of these PDF files, what would you store them on ? Should I get one of those “memory sticks” ( is that what they call them ) ?
Hi Carl! I’m glad I’m able to help you. 🙂
Rewiring the spiral-bound notebooks is easy. You can use the same metal wire that you removed from the notebook, if you didn’t damage the wire in the removal process. To remove the wire from the notebooks, I use needlenose pliers to unbend the ends, then just unthread it through the holes. After scanning the notebook, you reverse that process, threading it back through and rebending the ends so it’ll stay in place.
Here’s a video showing what it looks like to thread the coil through the notebook paper. (Not the whole video, but about halfway through.) They’re using a plastic coil, which you can also use if your metal binding has been damaged in the removal process. The only thing I disagree with in this video is that they cut the plastic spiral too short. I would leave 1/2 inch or so on each end, then bend that over, to keep the binding from moving around.
If you look back through my post, there’s a link to the scanner I currently have—I recommend this or the most recent model of it. The post is from a few years ago, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve updated the model again… It might be useful for you to speak with a sales rep or other expert to see what they recommend.
Good question about storage. Depending on how much storage space your computer has, you might not *need* to buy anything extra at all. Looking at my own PDFs, a typical 250-page notebook takes up about 75,000 kb of space, which is about 0.75 GB (gigabytes). If you have 250 notebooks of this size, they might take up something like 17.5 GB of space on your computer. Some computers have enough storage space to hold all that.
BUT, many computers won’t have enough extra space, and also, if you’re like me, you’ll want a backup drive—maybe even one to store at someone else’s house, in case your house is damaged in a fire or flood. So you might want to purchase at least one backup storage device, and maybe two if your computer can’t store the files to begin with. Nowadays, there are indeed memory sticks/flash drives that have ample storage space for you. Glancing around online, I’m amazed—this flashdrive is only $16 and has 2000 GB of storage space! In a world that’s getting more expensive, at least computer storage space is still getting cheaper and cheaper. 🙂
Thanks, Katie ! I bought the Epson Workforce ES-400 scanner, and they just delivered it today. I got it wired up, downloaded the software, and (after a bit of frustration) got it working now, I think. At least I did manage to successfully scan one test file. We’ll so how it goes tomorrow. I’m starting to get excited about (hopefully) being able to really do this. I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time ! Your advice has (seriously) been precious to me. I think my original idea of taking thousands of photographs of my written documents with a cell phone was probably not a good one. Your advice of using a good scanner (this one can scan 35 or 40 pages a minute, on BOTH sides of the page) will probably save me hundreds of hours of work and bother ! ….Then of course I’ll have to figure out how to organize all of these PDF files. Right now, I already have all my notebooks numbered, and maybe I’ll just use those numbers for now (Like “Notebook 1.c.” or “Notebook 17.b.” etc.
Carl, that’s wonderful!! I’m so happy that I’ve been able to help you. Keep in touch if you have any more questions.
I have one more piece of advice for now: Before you start scanning your notebooks in earnest, spend some time figuring out what scanning settings you want to use. My scanner gives me different options for file type (jpeg, PDF, etc.), 1-sided vs. 2-sided, color vs. black-and-white, and resolution, among other settings. I save all documents as PDFs.
Resolution is the biggest decision for me. If I scan at the highest resolution, the images will look as crisp as real life, but the file size will be larger and the scanning will be slower. In many cases, though, I have chosen that resolution, because I’m somewhat sentimental about the feel of the notebooks, not just the words in them. I opt for color and high res, so that when I read through the scanned versions, they will look very much how they look in real life—for instance, I can clearly see the lines of the notebook as well as the words I wrote. But for documents I don’t feel sentimental about, where I just want to capture my words, I opt for black-and-white and a more normal resolution, to save file space. The notebook lines don’t typically show, and the words are perfectly readable but not as crisp looking.
I think I was a ways into the project before I realized what my preferences were. I may have gone back and rescanned some notebooks I had already scanned. Since rescanning a notebook involves redoing the unbinding and rebinding process, it’s best to figure this out up front.
Best of luck to you!!
Thanks for your advice, Katie. I’ll try to figure it out. I haven’t had time to really test the scanner out yet, because my sister-in-law Teresa, who was also my next door neighbor, suddenly and unexpectedly passed away yesterday, and I’ve had to take in her cat, help clean out her apartment, etc. (Actually, and a bit weirdly, she was the one who bought the scanner for me, using her debit card, then I gave her the cash, and I went next door yesterday to tell her that the scanner had been delivered and to show it to her, and she wouldn’t answer the door…..and that is, apparently, near the time when she passed away !…..As I said, it’s a bit of strange story, but it’s true).
Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, Carl. I’m glad you’re able to help out with her cat and apartment and hope you’re holding up okay. Very sorry for your loss.
Thanks for caring, Katie. I’m getting a little frustrated now because I just tried unwinding my first wire bound notebook, and I spent half an hour on it and I can’t do it ! I guess I’ll just have to go by a pair of wire cutters and see if that helps !
I successfully scanned my first notebook today ! It was a large Five subject notebook, and ended up with 359 pages and used I think it was 17,000 kilobytes of memory space. And, though it took me about 15 minutes, I successfully replaced the metal coil in the notebook too ! (I was proud of myself for doing that). Now I’m wondering how to shrink the images on my computer screen, because the pages on the screen are even larger than their actual size in the notebooks. I can’t figure out how to change that (and I’ve tried). I also can’t find a way to share or copy and paste any of these PDF file pages. I wanted to show my Facebook friends a sample of my handwritten essays, but I can’t figure out how to do that either. Any ideas, Katie ?
Hi Carl – Congratulations! That’s wonderful that you are making progress with your scanning. 🙂 Some thoughts that will hopefully be helpful at this stage…
On file size: It might be useful to look again at my comments above from March 1 and March 7, in which I talk about file size and resolution. If you’re happy with the clarity and color of your images, then that’s great—17,000 might sound large, but kilobytes are actually very small. 17,000 KB = 0.017 GB!
To fully make sure your computer has enough storage, you should find out how much space it has available on its hard drive. For instance, if you have a Windows computer, you can follow the instructions here: https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-check-windows-storage. You could then calculate whether you have enough GB left to store all your new PDFs, based on the size of the first one you scanned. Note that you don’t want to completely fill the storage space on your computer. I’ve been told it should always have something like 10% of its storage space unused so that it can run properly.
For shrinking images on your screen: This should be just a matter of changing the viewing options. I’m assuming that when you open the PDF, it’s opening in Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader. In Adobe programs (and many others), you can make the document appear bigger or smaller by clicking the magnifying glass icons, which in my version of Adobe are located in the lower right. Another shortcut is to hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard and either hit the + or – key or scroll up or down on the mouse.
For sharing a sample with your friends: Adobe makes it hard to splice and edit PDFs—they want you to buy their full editing program, in which you can do those things and more. But there’s a workaround for cutting out parts of a PDF and saving them: you can do it in Google Chrome. Here are the steps I know:
1) Open the PDF of the full document and note the page numbers of the pages you want to share with friends. (In my version of Adobe, the page number appears halfway up the right side of the screen.) After you’ve noted them, close the PDF.
2) If you don’t have Google Chrome, download it onto your computer.
3) Find the PDF file again, right-click, choose “Open with,” and select Google Chrome.
4) Once the PDF has opened in Google Chrome, click the printer icon in the upper right. Under “Destination” in the print window, select “Save as PDF.”
5) Under “Pages” in the print window, select “Custom” and type the numbers of the pages you wish to save in the box.
6) Click “Save,” and use the “Save As” box to save the new document where you’d like to.
The original copy of the full PDF will still exist, and you’ll have a new document comprised of just the pages you wish to share!
Good luck as you get the hang of all this… 🙂
Love it ! And I already have Google Chrome, so I’ll try it. You’ve really been a BIG help to me in getting this project going, Katie. Couldn’t have gotten this far without your advice. Thanks SO much.
Hi Katie,
After you completed the digitization of your journals, have you switched from analog to digital for your ongoing journaling? Do you merge the two methods, or do you continue a handwritten journal and digitize periodically?
I’ve kept a digital journal for years, but I want explore hand writing my journal entries. I’m undecided about whether to take the time to re-enter my handwritten entries after every session or not. I may have a hard time breaking away from the keyboard method I’ve used for so long.
Hi Mark! Good question, and one I’ve thought about a lot. I grew up in the 80s and 90s (born in 1978), so all my journaling as a young person was done longhand. In college, when I started working a lot on the computer, I began journaling there too. But even so, I have always felt that my longhand writing is my most intimate writing, perhaps because I grew up with such a bond to my longhand journals. I do sometimes journal on the computer, especially when I’m short on time or thinking about something more intellectual, or when I’m feeling angry and wanting to rapid-type a quick rant that I can type faster than I can write longhand! 🙂 And the vast majority of my intellectual writing and blogging is done on the computer, too.
But most of the time, when it comes to journaling or writing parts of my memoirs that involve my deepest emotions, I turn to the longhand form. Somehow, for me, going analogue gets me out of my left brain and connects me more with my heart.
I almost never type up things I’ve written longhand in my journals, simply because I don’t have the time, energy, and patience. But before scanners became widely available, I did embark on a quest to type up many of my childhood journals, due to the same worry about losing them one day to fire or flood. I didn’t get very far, though—it was time-consuming! I was glad when document-feeding scanners came out.
All that said, I really envy you your digital journaling. If I felt a deep connection to my digital journals like I feel with my longhand ones, I would journal at the computer too. It’s much more practical, requiring far less storage space, being easy to back up, and being searchable! I wish those things were true of my notebooks.
Your digital journaling leads me to wonder how old you are. I hope you’ll check back here and tell me! I’m very curious whether you’re a younger person who grew up with computers—that might explain why you might feel more emotionally connected than I do when using the digital form. 🙂
Hi Katie. Excellent feedback and encouragement for me to consider. I am a younger person but that would depend on “youger than…”. 🙂 I am 62 and just retired from a career in Information Technology. Consequently, I’m very comfortable with using a keyboard for a good majority of written communication.
My handwriting, which was at an early age clear and legible, has been relegated to my signature on documents and hastily drawn lists of reminders and to-do’s. I’ve been reluctant with the pen and ink approach because, quite frankly, I have a hard time reading what I write. And I frequently enjoy reading my previous journal entries from a particular date or from keyword searches that help me to recall moments I had written about years ago.
Nevertheless, I want to experiment with what you alluded to above and what others have shared; how handwritten journal entries can open up other inner pathways that the keyboard might not lend itself to.
Quite likely, I will merge the two for awhile and see how that works. I want the benefits of both. I want it all!! LOL.
By the way, I’m located in the Portland area myself having moved here from the Midwest in 2018.
Very cool, Mark! Glad to see your response and to have connected with you. I’d love to hear how the merged approach goes! 🙂
Hi Katie, I’ve just started the same project as you, and finding this post was exciting! Not to mention very helpful. Thank you for sharing this!
I resonated with a lot of what you wrote about your journals. I was born in 1980 and so I also wrote my journals by hand for a long time. My first journal is from when I was 9.
Question: what made you decide to keep the physical copies of your journals? I’m wondering if I should just get rid of them after I digitize them. It would break my heart a little, but also…do I want to lug them around for the rest of my life?? I’d like to have less stuff as I age. (That said, I’ve reduced the first 30 years of my life to fit inside 2 plastic totes, so maybe that isn’t so bad.)
Hi Aleesa! That’s so exciting that you’re digitizing your journals, and I’m so glad I helped! And wow—2 plastic totes…that’s amazing. I have a minimalist streak and share your desire to simplify as I age.
Good question about keeping my physical journals. I think when I first started the project, I imagined offloading the physical copies, as I had done with so many other things, like old college papers and virtually all of my unsentimental paperwork.
I suppose one reason I didn’t do this with my journals is what you said, only possibly stronger—I think it would break my heart too much to part with them. I eventually realized that just as I get a lot out of the tactile experience of writing longhand, I also get a lot out of the tactile experience of curling up with an old physical journal and reading through it, like reading from a book instead of a Kindle. And these are “books” that I made, with my own handwriting, as a younger person than I am now. It’s just too sentimental.
But there’s also a much more pragmatic reason I’ve kept my journals: they are a backup to my digital backups. I realized they’re so important to me that they’re worth the space they take up, in case preserving their physical form helps them survive longer. Digital storage is relatively new; what if the files degrade over time or something? Or what if there’s a solar flare and electric equipment gets damaged?! Well, then we’d all have much bigger problems, I know. 🙂 But in my vague apocalyptic imaginings, I like the idea of keeping the physical journals, just in case. And so far, I’ve managed to find space for them in my homes, which makes it worth it to me—I eventually invested in a medium-sized file cabinet where they fit for now.
I hope this is helpful too! 🙂
Thanks Katie! Helpful things to consider. I think I’ll keep them for now. Thank you for your perspective!