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?