I'm a big fan of electronic logging, and chalk me up as another satisfied user of
DivingLog 5. Downloading from my dive computer saves me the chore of having to note exact intro and exit times and exact tank pressures, so it's a lot easier to track my gas consumption properly. I'm also getting water temps for free, which helps me keep track of correct exposure protection. Another advantage of electronic logging is that entering my notes on the computer makes it easier to produce something I can read properly later (when I wrote my essays in school, my notes were always full of deletions, additions and restructuring of the text, and usually quite unreadable a few weeks after I'd written it unles I wrote ).
On the other hand, I don't trust electronic media. It's not so much the loss of data that worries me since I have my data on Dropbox and synced to multiple computers, and I'm following a pretty strict backup regime, it's future compatibility. Paper media are inherently forward-compatible for any foreseeable future - excepting a "
Fahrenheit 451" scenario - while electronic media need constant maintenance to be accessible. I'm old enough to remember the 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks of the childhood of personal computing, and I have a lot of old files that either aren't physically accessible (how many of us have a floppy disk reader, a ZIP disk drive or a backup tape player these days?), or the file format isn't readily readable by today's software (WordPerfect v4 or MacWrite, anyone?).
That's why I keep a paper log in parallel with my electronic log. After downloading the data from my PDC to my PC and finishing the writeup of whatever I want to note down (weights, exposure protection, tank type, weather, observations, site quality etc.), I write everything into my paper log. It costs me about five minutes extra per dive logged, and I can spare that time.
Why, yes, I'm a belt-and-suspenders type of person. I also make paper prints of my photographs, in case you were wondering.
---------- Post added June 17th, 2014 at 09:11 AM ----------
Some computers come with a dive log program. I didn't much like Suunto's, and I understand it has gotten worse.
Version 4 sucks big time, not the least because it requires cloud storage and doesn't allow for local storage. Version 3 is sorta, kinda OK and, unlike Diving Log 5, downloads bookmarks from the computer.