A Guide to Personal Digital Archiving

[@noricd]

Take a bow Cassandra Tavukciyan. You delivered an exceptionally useful webinar. You scrunch complex topics into actionable essential guidance. Your slides are concise and clear. I'm commenting as someone who has been a digital archivist since 1983 and a specialist in document management especially for template contracts. As a lawyer I curate 22GB of documents which include about 4,000 legal template agreements I have personally drafted, update and re-use. As a student of other subjects I curate 15,000 non-personal photos, 15,268 music files, and a growing collection of historical film/video footage. I place considerable emphasis on the quality of naming conventions and metadata, topics covered by Cassandra. Like other topics each could be a half hour webinar on their own.

[@siriusestrela]

Great Video!

[@EnVideoZone]

A master class in knowledge transfer and presentation. Thank you.

[@inkdrop_]

Really useful video, thanks!

[@kjohnson2827]

Thanks

[@startpage717]

When the speaker is there why does the host need to be there on camera as they are not asking questions? (drinking water, head-scratching, movement just turn off your camera and let the host have the floor). Great presentation thank you for the information.

[@j01150126]

I lost all of my info stored on a Seagate Free Agent, hard drive due to magnetic head degradation after I stored them in a plastic container in a closet for 6 years. I lost many digitized photos and over 10,000 mp3s I had collected. I just purchased an external burner with C and M discs (100-1000 years integrity) but what system do I have to have to be able to read those disks is the problem say a decade from now? The hard drive in that system will be corrupted. The only solution is to keep buying a new hdd and ssd, laptop or tablet every 3-5 years. Both the HDD and SSD will degrade over 3 to 5 years if stored and not used (plugged in an refreshed/re-copied). Opening the files every year is a great tip, I will do that. The CD may only last 20 to 25 years but the HDD and SSD are even less reliable for long term preservation, the company I work for makes SSDs, they want you to buy more of them so there is no interest in having it last more than 3-5 years which is our warranty. With online storage, it could be hacked, the storage employees have access to the data, a court may subpoena the information so it is less secure. What I am looking for is a self contained digital solution. If we could make an electro-mechanical storage solution so we could read our files for decades that would be great. Do you know of any on premise (no internet or cloud needed) software we can used that use to run a digital copy and refresh and set it up annually with some type of schedule to replace the reading system (computer, tablet, laptop, etc) to avoid ferro magnetic degradation or just plain old mechanical wear and tear? Some of my old techie friends have set up a Raid Server for their data so it auto copies to another drive but eventually the drive and the server itself, the software will need to be replaced. What even worse is that I can't buy a spare hard drive and put it away because it will degrade over time if not used....just thinking out loud a great piece,

[@felixcarrier943]

I think many of the issues you raise indicate the need for a multi-pronged approach. For instance, while HDDs may not be suitable for "cold" storage, Blu-ray and M-Discs may meet your needs instead. With those, however, there's concern about long-term access, as you also need the equipment to be able to read the discs. That equipment is still widely available, but there's no guarantee that will remain the case in the future. HDDs are useful for regular backups but, as you've already figured out, they probably shouldn't be stored away for years at a time, and despite their improved reliability, mechanical failure remains a plausible risk. There's basically no ideal storage solution for digital data. You have to utilise what's available to you and take into account the strengths and limitations of the storage medium(s) you are using. Where possible, this may mean creating multiple copies in different mediums, and then storing each medium in an environment that is likely to ensure its preservation in the long-term. My takeaway from Cassandra's talk is that this should be seen as an active process. We can't assume that any storage medium is going to provide in itself the solution to our archiving needs. Along with evaluating what we want to preserve, we need to evaluate (and reevaluate) how we preserve it as new technologies emerge and as archival practices evolve.