Advice?   I would be sure to remember that preserving and archiving your digital data, personal or professional, takes more than just backing it up on one or more storage devices, although that's a good thing to do.

You should want to do on-going activities such as fixity checking and attendance monitoring of your files.  Also, you should have some sense of what all of the data is, even if that's just at an aggregate level.  Have you included a info.txt file in all of your files that gives some basic information about the creator / rights for using the data / when you last checked on it?

Knowing what you have is as important as backing it up -- what's the point if you lose your data but you don't know what there was?  If you recover it but don't know if you have the rights to share it why spend the time/effort for the recovery?

Personal Digital Archiving information can provide you with suggestions about how to preserve and archive your personal digital data ... and most of the effort is in on-going management and deciding what to keep, how to / if to transform your files into contemporary readable formats, and basic description at an overview level.

Some info:  http://library.columbia.edu/locations/dhc/personal-digital-archiving/online-resources.html 
More info:  http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/

Get together with others and learn what folks are dealing with now and swap solutions: 
https://library.stanford.edu/projects/personal-digital-archiving-2017 
and from previous years (2010 - 2016) http://personaldigitalarchiving.com/past-pda-conferences/ 

Kari R. Smith
Digital Archivist and Program Head for Born-digital Archives
Institute Archives and Special Collections
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Cambridge, Massachusetts
617.253.5690   smithkr at mit.edu   http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/  @karirene69

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2016 1:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] 46 gigabytes

Can y’all recommend how I might preserve and archive 46 gigabytes of personal data for the long haul?

For the past thirty years the librarian in me has been preserving and archiving my personal and professional data. It started out as a few text files, a couple of .exe files, the rare MacWrite file, and a growing number of HyperCard “stacks”. Then I moved away from proprietary word processing files and migrated to plain text documents as much as possible. These included scholarly documents, computer programs, and selected email messages in the form of mbox files. Still various flavors of images, movies, and PDF crept into my mix. And believe it or not, I print some of my text files, and I have printed major components of my images. 

For a while 3.5” discs were sufficient as a storage medium, but the pile grew and grew. I then moved to CD’s — migrating my 3.5” discs along the way — and the pile grew and grew again. Five years ago I migrated to DVD, and that was good for a bit (all puns intended). But now, as I catch up I have discovered that my archival output is close to 46 gigabytes of data just for the year 2014. Much of this data is really images, but not just pictures of my pet, but rather a sort of story.

What medium do you think I should use for archival preservation and storage? At 4 GB/DVD, I can’t afford to burn more than 10 DVD’s/year. That’s impractical. I want something that is device and operating system independent. CD’s were good choices, and I only needed to migrate things forward. DVD’s are okay, but I believe they write data in a compressed/encrypted fashion. I shy away from external hard drives because the are less likely to work with future computers, and besides, they have so many moving parts and complicated electronics. Just more things to break. 

I’m leaning towards SD disks, but yikes, they are nothing but pure bits. Moreover, they are physically very small and easily lost. 

What do y’all suggest?

† My iPhone is to blame. At more than 5 megapixels per image, the amount of disc space taken up by pictures is phenomenal. I suppose I could “weed” my images, but then much of the story would be lost, even if I printed. 

—
Eric Morgan