 You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Over 23 years ago my girlfriend (now wife) & me buggered off backpacking around the world for a year.
India, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Australia, NZ, Hawaii, US, Canada. Fantastic.
The great thing is that we took it in turns to write a diary every night. We have a marvelous record of where we were, at what time and doing what. Every now & again we open the books up & have a read. It really takes us right back there.
The books are getting pretty tatty now and Id like to preserve them in digital format, which means typing them up and backing them up (CD/DVD?). Id also like to scan our old photos and insert them in the relative dates.
Any advice on how I should go about undertaking such a task?
You could just scan the lot, and preserve it like that.
Or for a quick-n-dirty solution take photos of each page and save them to Evernote (I don't know if it then exports to any useful format?).
Otherwise, I think it depends how you want to be able to search, browse and index them (if it all).
Another option, get a wordpress blog and write some of them up online if you felt like sharing? Must have wonderful stories to tell?
well, If you just want to type them up, and keep them on your home PC something like word will do the job just fine...
if you want to turn them into a blog / webpage wordpress would be perfect
Depending on how neat your handwriting is, you could potentially scan the pages and run them through some OCR software which would convert a lot of the writing to text.
And then use word or something to put them into a formal document.
Never put the data into a format you can't be sure you will be able to get your data out of in the future. Things change.
Save as word by all means but also save as text too, in case you can't fire up the right version of word in the distant future.
Personally I'd make multiple copies - put a nice blog up, save as HTML/text/word thus keeping a backup on your PC and also online.
Also remember that CDs/DVDs degrade.
Scan your images at the highest resolution you can (disk/time!) ready for the future, you can always copy & 'downgrade' them for use. Save as TIFF then have JPEG versions about. Also scan the book as that would be a nice nostalgic bit.
Just my 2p.
Thanks for your advice folks. Really appreciate it 🙂
Just had a look at Evernote, it looks bob on, so Ive downloaded it & Ill look at it over the weekend. Thanks IA.
Hadnt really thought about blogging it all online tbh. Most of it is pretty boring soppy drivel from 2 young kids in love on a once in a lifetime adventure - and once in a lifetime is bang on. My missus is now severely disabled with MS and this is kinda why these words mean so much to me.
I may scan the books (so theyre always there) and also set about typing. I dont mind doing that. In fact I think itd be quite therapeutic.
Cheers all
The free iBooks creator is surprisingly capable, and you could then get it printed again.
Thing about evernote is you're storing in an online service.
Hence my comments about investigating if you can export from it to a reasonable format. However it is designed as an electronic notebook, to capture, well, all the sorts of things you have - so seems ideal in that respect.