Hi! Recently I’m interested in digital archiving. I want to tidy up my own files and I’m also building my home server which will act (among many other purposes) as a storage for… everything, including archives - files I might never touch again but I also don’t want to lose.
I would appreciate some descriptions of how Lemmings are archiving their files. I mean mostly personal files, not bought media. In particular:
- family photos,
- home-related documents,
- job-related documents,
- school materials,
- medical documents,
- abandoned projects (software of other),
- travel related stuff,
- receipts, invoices,
- and more!
Some example questions I’m interested in:
- Do you ever delete anything or do you archive everything?
- Do you use dedicated software or do you just store plain old files on disk?
- Do you use archive formats? For instance ZIP, tar, etc.
- Do you use compression? Like gzip, zstd, xz, etc.
- What naming convention do you use?
- Do you use spaces in the filenames?
- What directory structure do you use?
For photos I use synology photos (it’s a legacy that’s good enough and I don’t want to migrate my parents and in-laws to immich). Photos are backed up logically into folders in normal type files, so in case the software stops working, it’s all still there.
For documents I use paperlessngx. Its less friendly should it stop working (the documents are numbered going up, no human names) but they are still pdf/jpg whatever, so its just some more work to get to know what they are.
Both of these have lasted me for years now, so I’m not too worried for the future.
As for all other files, just some shared folders where I back stuff up based on my own use.