Information Archive Suggestions

Posted by Chris Eller
Sep 27, 2010 at 07:35 PM

I currently have information dating back to the early-90s stored in a variety of formats ranging from Word documents, pdfs, InfoSelect, OneNote, Evernote, and now Personal Brain. (All of my pre-1990s data was stored on 5.25-inch or 3.5-inch floppy disks, with most of it written on my trusty Epson QX computer that ran on CP/M. We won’t even talk about my college papers (1982-1986) written on my Atari 64 that were stored on cassette tape!) Some formats will probably never become extinct (e.g. Word docs and pdfs), while others are already starting to gather dust (e.g. InfoSelect). My experience with InfoSelect leaves me cautious of putting all my eggs in one basket that may someday no longer exist and that has no simple export feature.

Has anyone on this forum thought through these issues and come up with a good long-term archival strategy for information. I am willing to make the effort to assemble and compile all of the various resources into one database, but I want some degree of confidence that it will still be easily accessible in 10 or 20 years. Pdf files are an obvious choice, but GETTING information into a pdf format is tedious and labor intensive and getting information OUT of the pdf format is equally difficult. Moreover, there are few good database programs that handle pdf files well.

Thoughts?

Chris Eller