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?
  • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    8 days ago

    Most stuff at our home are analog and/or physical (be it documents, the few photos we care to keep, books, even movies and music are on DVDs and CDs). For digital files (including copies of whatever analog stuff we wish to make a backup of it):

    • Good old plain files. As much as possible, I will use standard file formats (aka no proprietary ones, as I want to be sure I’ll be free to quickly and easily move from any app and/or OS to another, like I did after almost 40 years using Apple moving to GNU/Linux)

    • No zip or compression. Plain copies on encrypted external drives (note the plural) and also a remote backup on an encrypted cloud storage that I use for archive purpose only, I use another cloud services for the storage of ‘active’ files. Both those clouds are EU-based and independent from the GAFAM (I’d rather spend my money with local businesses). They’re the German Filen.io (for encrypted archival), and the Swiss Infomaniak Kdrive for active files.

    • Local backups are done using rsync, while remote ones using their own dedicated apps because it does the job and I never bothered testing something else ;)

    • Backups directory structure is an exact copy of my working directory structure. In case I need to restore something I can then easily find it, and when I need to restore the entire backups, it’s just a matter of rsync-ing it back, which is real quick.

    • I don’t use different services for different type of files.

    • Legal papers, contracts,… We keep them as long as it’s necessary (ore required by law) then we toss them without any any worries. the print version and the digital one. Same with receipt. Since all my files are names based on the date of creation it’s easy to remove whatever becomes obsolete.

    • abandoned projects are trashed _the moment I decide they have no obvious use and won’t have in the future. But since any projetc I work on can last for many years, I seldom ‘trash’ anything after I started working on it instead I will mercilessly prune out most ‘good ideas’ and ‘maybe’ only keeping what’s truly worth my time.

    Edit: typos + missing link.