HN Explorer

Ask HN: Personal Data Preservation Strategies

7 points by tbirrell ↗ HN
I have some personal data that I can reasonably expect to never need again, aside from maybe just wanting to view it for historical reasons, but I don't want to just delete it all since it would be irrecoverable. How do you go about preserving personal files that you won't need but don't want to lose.

I was thinking of something like zipping it all, and putting it on a dedicated hard drive to create my own personal archive for this and other similar data. But thought I'd see if someone had already invented this wheel before purchasing the hardware for this strategy.

5 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 28.0 ms ] thread
jrowley
Couple of questions

1) how much data are talking about? Can you fit it all on DVD or a couple of flash drives and stick in a safe deposit box?

2) I guess you’ve already answered this question but I’d consider asking yourself if life would be easier if you just deleted the data and no longer had to worry about its existence. If you’re not sure if any of it will be valuable, then maybe this in indication that the data needs to be pruned for the good stuff. Keeping it intact and secure overtime is a non trivial cost and digging deep in an archive for that one file is often a headache.

I’ll add a caveat that this second approach might seem counterintuitive, considering how easy it is to store data, and how great it can feel to pull that one file when you need it, but the question is whether this data will just be a burden over time or not.

This makes me think that I should really clean off and organize my personal computer HD

tbirrell
1) Probably on the order of about 200GB of random file types. Definitely within the range of reasonably priced HDD.

2) True, I just can't bring myself to delete it yet, thus the hope that someone had concocted a way to minimize the non-trivial cost of long-term storage.

ohiovr
I use offline hard drives to store files that I don't think I'll be using in the future (but don't have the heart to destroy). I direct the find command to a file to make a searchable index of the drive in case I need to find a file but am too lazy to connect the drives and search them.