The Fallacy of "Saved"
We often think that once we hit "Save" or upload a file to the cloud, the job is done. This is the "Fire and Forget" model. It works for stone tablets; it fails for bits.
An Evergreen Ritual acknowledges that entropy is constant. The ritual combats entropy through:
- Migration: Moving data from dying formats to living ones (e.g., .doc to .pdf).
- Verification: Checking checksums to detect Bit Rot.
- Re-contextualization: Updating the metadata so the file makes sense to a new generation.
Implementing the Ritual
For the personal archivist, the Evergreen Ritual replaces the panic of data loss with the rhythm of gardening. It might look like:
- The Annual Harvest: Once a year, export all social media data to local storage.
- The 5-Year Migration: Every 5 years, move data from old hard drives to new ones.
- The Format Review: Identifying files in "at-risk" formats and converting them.
Field Notes
The "Ise Jingu" Model: The Ise Grand Shrine in Japan is rebuilt every 20 years. This has been happening since the 7th century. The physical wood is new, but the informational structure is ancient. The ritual of rebuilding preserves the knowledge of construction. Digital preservation should mimic this: we must constantly "rebuild" our data on new servers to preserve the information.
Link Rot Repair: Fixing broken links on a wiki (like this one) is a micro-ritual. It is the act of darning the fabric of the web to keep it from unraveling.
Ephemera
The term "Evergreen" is borrowed from journalism (content that remains relevant) and botany (plants that don't die in winter). In Archaeobytology, it means data that does not hibernate.