[LinuxBender]

I can not speak for others or the consensus but since the 90's I have always just used a plain text file with simple delimiters in a format that I understand so that I can massage the output format to match whatever needs the information. This has worked great for me and is simple to back up and newer versions make this easy to get a good compression ratio of a single tarball of every version. Multiple files as many people have passed away and a few people are no longer friends but I keep older versions to remind me of them.

[bjoli]

I have a recfile for this. It is pretty stellar.

[amerkhalid]

Nothing beats plaintext format. I use Google Sheets but download it locally as csv every year or so.

[westcort]

Seconding a text file. I keep addresses this way, too. So does my father. So did my grandfather. I have their files, as well.

[enasterosophes]

Do you mind if I ask what format you've settled on? Having a system evolve over multiple generations means you must have pruned out all the bad ways to do it.

I've got this vision of a Neal Stephenson story which will never be written about a family in the 22nd century that has kept all their personal contacts in Git for over 100 years ...

[froggerexpert]

Consider https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/

Plain text, but with querying, and likely exporters/importers into calendars.

[westcort]

Thank you! This is interesting!

[westcort]

Grandpa was an early adopter of computers due to his work in cryptography, which started even before WWII. He wrote his files mostly in WordStar, and a few other formats that are still readable. Most of these are on a drive and on 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy disks. Dad uses KEDIT, and now Notepad++, probably because KEDIT was popular in Princeton at the time. I think John McPhee still uses KEDIT. I use plain text files and HTML.