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?
  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    2·
    4 days ago

    I have a set of commands I run occasionally to back up my homedir. That contains pretty much anything that’s text, text-like and related metadata. Things like personal documents, code projects, etc. are all in there. Basically anything that isn’t enormous goes into that.

    i.e. Software installed into my homedir by things like Steam and Wine are currently skipped. It currently runs to about 1GB, compressed.

    Minecraft worlds are also skipped but get their own separate backup command set.

    Never really got around to compiling those command sets into actual scripts. I kind of prefer to copy-paste them out of a text document and into the terminal so I can take action at each step if something goes wrong.

    The major failing is that they each build a single tar.xz, which I then copy to an external 1TB drive. There’s no deduplication so that’s getting a bit full at this point.

    Photos and media hoards (software installers, website rips, music) currently go on a single Storage drive that isn’t backed up. I should probably do something about the photos, tbh.