This Personal Digital Archiving guide is compiled and adapted from:
We record our personal experiences and life events digitally on computers, phones, and other electronic devices in the form of documents, email, photos, social media, and audio/video files. But unlike physical records, which can be stored and preserved over time with fairly little effort, digital materials require ongoing active intervention to remain accessible. Computer crashes, changes in software and hardware, and the overwhelming volume of digital content we generate on a daily basis can contribute to the loss of important memories if we don't take action to keep digital records accessible over time.
Personal digital archiving is the active maintenance of your digital life through preservation, management, and access. Personal digital archiving and digital preservation involve a series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as they are needed. These materials may be digitized versions of physical resources or materials that have always existed digitally (born-digital).
Digital content relies on technology that is constantly changing in order for us to interact with it, share it, or access it over time. Familiarizing yourself with personal digital archiving and digital preservation best practices helps prepare you to manage what makes up your digital world and helps you to avoid common issues like lost files, corrupt data, and file format obsolescence.
Personal digital archives can be as broad or as limited as you want: e.g. every email, social media post, essay for class, and phone picture you’ve ever created vs a selection of content meaningful to you personally or created within a certain time period.
Different types of content will carry different meaning to you and receive a different level of treatment. For instance, you may want to organize and preserve all classwork and vacation photos, but feel less concerned about your social media posts. Much like our physical world, our digital world can hold valuable and meaningful content worth preserving (for practical or sentimental reasons) and requires special considerations in order to make it long-term accessible.
Identify the digital materials you want to keep over the long term. Make a list of the types of digital files you want to keep. At first, focus your preservation efforts on small collections of the most important files in specific areas, such as travel photos or research papers. Don't get burned out by trying to save everything and spending time on things you don't actually need. When deciding what to save, consider the following questions:
Figure out where the files you want to keep are located and copy them to one central digital location, so they can be backed up. Think about all the computers, devices, and online spaces that may contain your digital content:
Organize your files so they'll be easy to browse or search. This could include renaming files descriptively, e.g. changing “Notes.docx” to “20251104_HistoryClassNotes.docx”, or organizing the files in groupings by subject or chronological order. See the File Naming Conventions section in this guide for more file naming information. Your files aren't accessible unless you can find them and know what they are.
With all of your important digital files in one digital location, back it all up by copying the entire collection to other storage media, such as personal external hard drives.
Follow the 3-2-1 Rule:
3 – Make 3 copies
2 – Use 2 different types of storage media (e.g. two separate copies on two different external hard drives, or one copy on an external hard drive and one in the cloud)
1 – Store 1 backup in a different location
An easy acronym to keep in mind is LOCKSS: Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.
It is also important to consider if any of your materials have medical, financial, or personal information that you would want to treat extra carefully. For instance, you may want to store any sensitive personal information separate from more general material, and you may want to keep sensitive personal information in an extra secure space.
Digital preservation requires active maintenance over time to ensure that your materials remain accessible. Whatever type of storage media you use, monitor it by periodically checking up on your digital archive.
