How to temporarily disable access to my own files?
December 29, 2015 4:59 AM Subscribe
How can I protect me from myself during a time of emotional upheaval, in terms of access to my own past journal entries?
I keep a simple online journal (a text file per day). These are just stored in Dropbox, a folder per year and then a folder per month.
I don't want to lose these files. But I want to "lock myself out of them" for a time, because re-reading entries from the past is just depressing me.
Relationships are damaged and right now I am really struggling with them. When I see what I wrote from times past, the memories are more than I can take. I sometimes wish now I had not written such detailed, vivid descriptions and recollections.
I try not to go there but when I get so sad I just can't help myself. I mourn the relationship and reading reminders of when things were so different between us hurts so much. But in my sadness, I am just drawn to these entries as if it lets me return to the place we used to be. Stupid, I know. I perpetuate my own misery.
Is there anything I can do to sort of "safe deposit box" these files away from myself, but just for, say, 6 months to a year? Like set a password that will reveal itself to me on a future date? Does such a function exist for other purposes, that I can leverage in this situation?
I keep a simple online journal (a text file per day). These are just stored in Dropbox, a folder per year and then a folder per month.
I don't want to lose these files. But I want to "lock myself out of them" for a time, because re-reading entries from the past is just depressing me.
Relationships are damaged and right now I am really struggling with them. When I see what I wrote from times past, the memories are more than I can take. I sometimes wish now I had not written such detailed, vivid descriptions and recollections.
I try not to go there but when I get so sad I just can't help myself. I mourn the relationship and reading reminders of when things were so different between us hurts so much. But in my sadness, I am just drawn to these entries as if it lets me return to the place we used to be. Stupid, I know. I perpetuate my own misery.
Is there anything I can do to sort of "safe deposit box" these files away from myself, but just for, say, 6 months to a year? Like set a password that will reveal itself to me on a future date? Does such a function exist for other purposes, that I can leverage in this situation?
Best answer: You could password-protect the files and send the password to the future with futureme.org.
posted by Phssthpok at 5:32 AM on December 29, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by Phssthpok at 5:32 AM on December 29, 2015 [5 favorites]
Why not an offsite hard backup, like burning old folders to CD, and then placing them in a physically remote location?
posted by GhostintheMachine at 6:44 AM on December 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by GhostintheMachine at 6:44 AM on December 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
Not knowing how you use Dropbox or how much you're struggling with this because the files are just sitting there on your computer, one option would be to simply turn off the sync of those files on your individual computers.
The feature is meant to keep your Dropbox stuff from taking up hard drive space on machines where you don't need something (e.g. having a big library of media files meant for your desktop machine taking up all the space on a smaller laptop drive, or keeping work projects out of your home computer).
It also works great to just get the files out of your sight. They'll still be there (and available via the Dropbox website), but not where you can get at them by clicking around in your computer. Maybe that's enough?
posted by mph at 9:22 AM on December 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
The feature is meant to keep your Dropbox stuff from taking up hard drive space on machines where you don't need something (e.g. having a big library of media files meant for your desktop machine taking up all the space on a smaller laptop drive, or keeping work projects out of your home computer).
It also works great to just get the files out of your sight. They'll still be there (and available via the Dropbox website), but not where you can get at them by clicking around in your computer. Maybe that's enough?
posted by mph at 9:22 AM on December 29, 2015 [1 favorite]
Not a direct answer to your question, but: What you're trying to do requires you to give up access to (and control of) files that are important to you. Be very sure that you have multiple safe, reliable, accessible backups.
For example, burned CD-Rs are routinely defective, and even correctly burned CD-Rs sometimes degrade shockingly fast. Portable disks work fine until one day you plug them in and they don't mount. Online backups are great until you forget the password. Or maybe you miss the email that says they are going out of business and you have 6 months to copy out what you want.
If you care about these files, make sure that you use a belt, suspenders, extra rope, and maybe a spare pair of pants for good measure when you move them out of your own reach.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:37 AM on December 29, 2015 [2 favorites]
For example, burned CD-Rs are routinely defective, and even correctly burned CD-Rs sometimes degrade shockingly fast. Portable disks work fine until one day you plug them in and they don't mount. Online backups are great until you forget the password. Or maybe you miss the email that says they are going out of business and you have 6 months to copy out what you want.
If you care about these files, make sure that you use a belt, suspenders, extra rope, and maybe a spare pair of pants for good measure when you move them out of your own reach.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:37 AM on December 29, 2015 [2 favorites]
Depending on how techy you are, one possible answer is public key cryptography - it allows you to encrypt a message (or file) that you cannot decrypt, but someone else can. It does require trusting someone else (or maybe an online service) to give you the decryption key when you're ready for it.
If you want to go that route, Alan Eliasen describes it in this section of his excellent PGP/GPG tutorial, with how-to details elsewhere in the same document.
There's not much benefit over just burning them to a CD, except that a PGP key is much shorter than years of diaries, so you can easily print out a backup copy of the key to give to the same person who holds the digital version. If the CD or flash drive fails, you can still type the key in by hand.
posted by sibilatorix at 10:05 PM on December 29, 2015
If you want to go that route, Alan Eliasen describes it in this section of his excellent PGP/GPG tutorial, with how-to details elsewhere in the same document.
There's not much benefit over just burning them to a CD, except that a PGP key is much shorter than years of diaries, so you can easily print out a backup copy of the key to give to the same person who holds the digital version. If the CD or flash drive fails, you can still type the key in by hand.
posted by sibilatorix at 10:05 PM on December 29, 2015
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posted by tivalasvegas at 5:18 AM on December 29, 2015