Research Guides: Personal Digital Archiving : Home

Additional Resources

Library of Congress Handouts:

How Long Will Digital Storage Media Last?

Keeping Personal Digital Photographs

Keeping Personal Digital Audio

Keeping Personal Websites, Blogs and Social Media

To Learn More About Digital Preservation

Practical E-Records by Chris Prom

Digital Preservation at the Library of Congress

Retro Media: Memory (and Memories) Lost from the University at Buffalo Libraries

Olive Executable Archive for Software Preservation at Carnegie Mellon University

Keeping Your Information Secure

Encrypting Your Files and Folders
7-Zip is open source software used to compress or zip files secured with encryption.

When you send or transfer files that contain Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or other confidential and sensitive data the files must be encrypted to ensure they are protected from unauthroized disclosure.

This encryption software will help with your personal data.

The Basics

This list is compiled and adapted from information by Phil Michel, Digital Conversion Coordinator from the Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress and Vassar Digital Library:

1. Identify where you have your information.

2. Decide what is important to you.

3. Get organized. Designate folders for certain types of materials or events.

4. Make copies of your data.

5. Understand the trade-offs of placing objects in various websites, etc., and what is helping you accomplish digital preservation.

6. Embed extractable metadata whenever possible.

The 3-2-1 rule

Make three copies
Have at least two of the copies on two different types of media
Keep one copy in a different location from where you live / work

Storage options: Your BMC H drive, an external hard drive, cloud services (Dropbox, Google Drive). Getting into the habit of backing up your photos (and all of your born-digital materials) to different media regularly will be a lifelong skill.

Filenaming

Come up with a clean and consistent way to name your files. Filenames should never have special characters (%$*@) or spaces. Stick with underscores and dashes (_ or -) if you need gaps. Stick with the system. Check out this great guide to Cross-Platform Naming Conventions by Megan Clark at the Help Desk.

Metadata

Tag or develop metadata (description) for your files so they will be easily retrievable later on.

Remember:

It’s good to manage things yourself. Storage in the cloud or a third party company has no guarantees. Make them one of the options for backups. Stay organized, save multiple copies in multiple places, and refresh your media.

Georgia Archivists Resource

Society of Georgia Archivists Resources

Document includes:

Part I: The What and the Why of Personal Digital Archiving
Part II: The Landscape of Digital Records
Part III: Best Practices for Creating Personal Digital Records
Part IV: Ownership and Copyright of Personal Digital Records
Part V: Privacy and Security of Personal Digital Records
Part VI: Best Practices for Storing Personal Digital Records
Part VII: Best Practices for Access and Ongoing Management of Personal Digital Records
Part VIII: Best Practices for the Digital Afterlife
Digital Preservation Illustrations