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Ideally this is a program, not a project. It is never “one and done.” There is not one fixed solution or outcome. With my help you will improve your game which aims toward mastery over the files you care about.

Sadly many will face a “Digital Dark Age.” The billions of smart phone photos people take will rarely survive. When loved ones pass away, you will not find the family photos in a shoebox. It’s constant work to migrate them from perishable media and obsolete formats.

“What happens when today’s high-tech data storage systems become tomorrow’s floppy discs?
Google Vice President Vint Cerf is concerned about the answer and its implications for preserving history. Speaking at a conference of top American scientists, Cerf described such a loss of important information as a possible “digital Dark Ages.”

NPR

“Vint Cerf, widely recognized as one of the founders of the modern Internet and now an executive at Google, said this week that due to constant updates and improvements to hardware and software, documents that are available today may be inaccessible in the future.”

Time Magazine

Personal Digital Archiving = organizing, adding metadata, backups & long-term preservation.

Metadata

For our purposes metadata is a fancy word for labeling. Essentially this means good and consistent file naming, ie. establishing naming and tagging conventions.

For a refined metadata ideas, go to Getty Images, read the tags. • Consider the role of folders in organizing files. • Some file types allow you to embed metadata and tags *in* the file. • Unleash the power of *content* text searches across your hard drive to make your assets discoverable.

Back-up

Back-up means short term protection of working files. • Archiving is for the long-term preservation of legacy files. • Learn simple software to help automate back up and cataloging. • When using specialized software, understand the difference between back-up and synchronization.

Archiving Golden Rule

3-2-1 Rule
• Have at least three copies of your data
• Store the copies on two different media 
• Keep one backup copy offsite

Storage solutions -> External Drives, NAS (Network Attached Storage) & RAIDs (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)

Personal Information Management

After some remediation we’ll work on better Personal Information Management habits. PIM = “the activities people perform to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve, use and control the distribution of…” documents, files, etc. After a decade or so, you need to think about “migration” and every five years “refreshing” storage media.

The Cloud

Is not a Magic Bullet. It might help you preserve files but doesn’t help you find them. Let me help you find the right mix between the Cloud and local storage, no digital storage medium is 100% guaranteed. This from the Library of Congress PDA blog “Does the cloud service have tools available for upload and backup maintenance? Can the tools or services be configured for periodic automated backup? Can I access my cloud-stored stuff from any Internet connection, anywhere?”