[tmslnz]

On the one hand, I find myself aligned with many ideas exposed here. On the other hand I fight myself constantly to avoid keeping too much around, or to prevent the archiving process from becoming more important than the archived material itself.

Unlike others I ended up consolidating everything into a big dumb set of folders on my NAS just because it’s cognitively easier to keep track of than a smattering of online services.

But then again… what is worth keeping, really? How often do we go back to old photos? How often do we need a 10y old bank statement? How hard is it to redownload some film or music?

[ggrrhh_ta]

The value is not in how often one revisits the past, but on how important (and I mean from a personal point of view mostly) a billionth of that stored past might become in the future. If you can, why not?

[tmslnz]

True, a for a good part it is that "maybe" that makes me (and others) do it, but I can see how it's akin to choosing not to make a choice. There's a tangible cost to this however… which is manifested quite clearly in this very comment thread.

All I am saying — to myself mostly — is that to learn to be OK with skipping a few beats when it comes to archiving digital artefacts is just as important as the archival strategy.

[ggrrhh_ta]

I get your point, in fact, I don't put a lot of effort in getting things organized to any degree of "good". I "invest" in archiving (I almost never wipe a memory card, a floppy disk, or a hard disk, I just store it. I do copy CDs into hard disks though). If I had, let's say, two months just to organize the data, I would, and to me, it would more than compensate the time doing it. Every time that I had to look for something I had done 10, 15, 20 years ago I find, in the process of searching for that specific thing so much gold, so much joy, that it paid off. But of course, I do not obsess with categorization. I have two axis: the "technological age" (dictated by the kind of storage device) and the way I categorized it then within that device. I think I have been more or less consistent with how I name folders, where I put things, etc. over a long time.