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?
My scheme might come useful to somebody.
On the home server, there is a 2 Tb solid state drive and a 2 Tb spinning drive. Stuff goes on the SSD, it’s a regular ext4 volume mounted at /work. The spinning drive is configured to spin down after 10 min when not in use.
Once a week a script mounts the spinny one, runs an rsync from SSD to it, then unmounts. Thus the spinny one only runs about 20 min per week: it’s going to last forever. If the SSD borks it’s easily replaced and repopulated.