Archiving my journal

   After reading Armand's tale of woe about his journal being deleted for an imaginary TOS violation, I decided it was about time to start archiving my older entries. Even without alleged hackers or inept ISP employees, the world is a capricious place. Servers can crash in the most outrageously catastrophic ways. Stuff can be lost. Stuff is lost. Important stuff. Every day. Here's what I'm doing.

   I went back to my very first entry. I clicked and dragged to highlight the entire entry, including the title and date, but not including the headers or footers. If I wanted, I could have included the comments, but I decided not to. Then, at the top left of the AOL window, I clicked where it says Edit, and from the resulting drop down menu I clicked on Copy. This copied the highlighted text to my Windows clipboard, where it will be held until I copy something else, or turn off the computer.
   I then went back to the top left of my AOL window, clicked on File, and from that drop down menu, I hovered my mouse over the word New, and from the sub menu that showed up, I clicked on Text Document. That caused a small text window to open, with the title "Untitled" in, of all places, the Title Bar. Left clicking in the text area, I ran my pointer down the list and clicked on Paste. What do you think happened? Yes! My journal entry appeared in the text window.
   Next, I went back up to that popular spot: the top left corner of the AOL window, and clicked on File again. This time, I selected from the drop down menu Save As... Another little box popped up. This one was the save window. In the spot where it says File Name, I typed a file name. Fancy that! I made it something that would be relevant to reconstructing the journal later. I used the date of the original entry.
   Now, before I clicked on the Save button, I made sure I was saving to a good location; somewhere I could easily find the entries again. In this case, I created a new folder called Archived journal entries. Then I clicked save.
   Next step: move along to the next entry, and do it all over again. Yes, it is time consuming, but worth it, if your journal entries are valuable to you.

   Now, here's an interesting thing that I only just discovered today. The AOL text document is a format called .rtf. That stands for Rich Text File, which is text with some basic html formatting included. What that means, is that if you have any graphics or pictures in an entry, they get saved right along with the words. You will see that another folder, called files, is created, and the pictures are saved there. As long as you don't move that folder, when you use AOL to open that text document, you will see the graphics in your entry as well. Cool!
   After I get a substantial number of entries saved, I will put them on a CD for true archival storage.