On the one hand, I can't trust electronic devices anymore, so I can't trust writing or drawing digitally.
I still have the laptop and it's Linux and it feels very obedient to my commands. It's very nice, very fast, seemingly reliable.
But it also feels like its hardware is going to fail anytime soon. My HDD is old, really old (decades old), and there are no brand-new 2.5" HDDs out there (at least no trustworthy pitch supposedly selling a brand-new 2.5" HDD), just SSDs.
And SSDs are funny: in a nutshell, they try to "hold" electrons inside... despite Heisenberg's uncertainty principle stating how electrons are pretty agitated, insofar they can be cheering and jumping anywhere across the cosmos!
Inversely, HDDs try to keep a magnetic field, their sectors become magnetized after bits are written to it. See, there are still readable VHS and cassette tapes, recorded in 90s (3 and a half decades ago, by now), and their working principle is practically the same as the HDD: magnetism. I doubt it that SSDs could stick (pun intended) for so long. My HDD is still holding.
So I simply can't trust modern technologies. If I even trusted them once, now I can't. So I can't trust writing through an electronic device. Nor drawing digitally.
On the other hand, there's this urge inside me to keep writing and keep drawing. A few doctors could refer to this phenomenon as "hypergraphia". I was never diagnosed with Geschwind Syndrome, yet all of its symptoms check like a bingo for me, so I probably have this thing.
I got used to write outside the handwriting. My fingers are better typing than holding a pen or pencil to create text.
Perhaps I should get a typewriter, it would be fun, lots of nostalgic noise, and much more reliable than electronic writing. A typewriter lacks some electronic text editing features (like erasing text), but those same features are the culprits of data loss, so it's best not to have them.
There's the cost barrier, though: they're probably expensive. So paper and pencil are the only things I could probably afford.
Yeah, I should stick to paper and pencil... Because "to write or not to write" is not the question: it's about "how" and "where" to write.
In my case, the how and where are like focusing on the semantics and essentially holding me back from actually writing. A small amount of paranoia is healthy in this day and age but truly what matters is that you create. After all, our days are numbered and 3 generations down there might not be many who remember you.
I create a backup of my computer's information on an external hard drive.
While I do have an external hard drive with some backup, it's a 3.5" HDD that I removed from a Western Digital USB/Firewire Storage (so it's quite old). Since I need to use it through a SATA-to-USB dock (and it only has 320GB), I usually use my laptop's HDD, which is almost full.
Since I lost my smartphone data, I've been more dedicated to backing up everything I produce to various places, including (but not limited to) the "cloud" (which is simply someone else's computer somewhere, equally prone to data loss).
But, yeah, I probably need to buy an external hard drive, a brand-new one.
Perhaps consider punchcards as a nice middle ground. The most analog of digital storage mediums. Or is it the most digital of analog storage mediums?
Punchcards are cool. Sadly their data density is very low. I once imagined a smaller version of it, using a mechanically-controlled needle to poke holes on a paper, and a laser pointer to read them. Such approach would allow for high data density. It'd render the card/paper unstable and prone to tearing apart, though.