I've been watching the "available storage" bars on my various digital storage systems creep up over the last couple years with a growing sense of dread. Each percentage point is a tick closer to an upgrade to my package—money I'll have to pay Apple, Google, and Dropbox to continue to store my digital life. Maybe more importantly, I'm aware of just how much stuff I produce every day, and as the mess grows, I wonder if I should do something about it. On worse days, I think maybe I should just succumb to the digital hoarder house I've built for myself.
It is probably my obsession with my own death, paired with the ever-present anxiety about whether the way I spend my days truly matters at all, that has led to an interest in personal archiving practices. My life's work amounts to several terabytes' worth of mp3s, wavs, text files, and jpegs that live on server space I pay to lease somewhere in the world. I like the idea of my work being accessible after I'm gone, and for a long time I trusted the infrastructure of the internet to do that archival work for me. But if the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that only dummies blindly trust big tech to operate in their best interest.
“"People do not realize how fragile digital media is," said Margot Note, an archivist who specializes in helping individuals and businesses create their own archives. Note told me about bit rot, which is a phenomenon where digital files become corrupted over time from neglect. To get specific: If left alone for too long, the individual bits that make up a digital file can unintentionally flip from 0 to 1 and vice versa, which eventually renders the file unreadable. "Digital files actually require active maintenance. And it's not something that you have to do right away, but over time, they're going to be unreadable." Note suggests to maintain files using two techniques: refreshing and migration. Refreshing refers to routinely moving data from one storage medium to a newer one, like taking a document from a floppy disk and saving it to a newer hard drive.
But there are other, more general concerns about the longevity of digital files. "I don't know if Microsoft Word is going to be around 100 years from now," she said. "You're dependent on the software. You're dependent on the hardware, and you're dependent on corporations that could go out of business. So if you put something in the cloud, you could lose access to it." Migration refers to updating data that was created for obsolete mediums or software into more modern forms, like converting a WordPerfect document to an updated version of Microsoft Word.
Because my specific flavor of neurosis blended with the knowledge that I'm soon going to give birth to a human, I was finally convinced to download Note's book, Creating Family Archives. What I found there was both useful and anxiety-inducing.
"External hard drives, if stored correctly and used sparingly, might last a decade," Note writes. "If not treated well, they may have five years of useful storage life." I thought about my stack of external hard drives sitting in an office drawer, some of which date back to 2010 and which haven't been connected to a computer in at least ten years. I wasn't sure what kinds of files I would find in these old drives, but I hoped that my current MacBook could open the files that were created on a 2008 Dell laptop.
Note refers to the 3-2-1 rule of archiving: Make three copies of something, store it in at least two types of media, and keep one copy at a physically separate location. A practical example: You might keep an album of family photos on your phone, but also consider printing them out (for a second form of media), and storing digital versions on both an external hard drive and in cloud storage (which actually makes four copies, including the printed versions, in at least two physical locations, if you think of the cloud as server space that exists somewhere else in the world).
Here's what I was working with: 58 GB in my personal paid Google Drive, 6 GB in my Defector Google Drive, 3.19 TB in my personal paid Dropbox, 535.45 GB in my paid iCloud, and six external hard drives. The only small bright spot in my current archiving practice is that I store nothing on my computer; after going through enough computer catastrophes, I am religious about saving everything important directly to Dropbox. This gives me some peace, because I know I can switch devices at any point, but it also means my Dropbox is a mess.
Some of the goals I had for this project:
- To stop paying for unnecessary storage space in so many places.
- To streamline all of my personal and professional archives onto one external hard drive (an 8TB monster I got at Costco) and one paid cloud backup to make future archiving and migration simpler.
- To set up an ongoing archival practice for myself that I can stick to in the long term.
First, I dug out my 8TB hard drive and plugged it in. The last time I used it was in 2020, when I backed up my wedding photos. This was where I hit my first technological roadblock. The hard drive would need to be reformatted before I could add any new data to it, because it had previously been formatted for an older computer I no longer have. Without getting too into the weeds, the hard drive was meant for a PC system, and so each time it connected to a Mac, it had to be formatted specifically for that computer if I wanted to add or remove from it.
This meant that I actually had to delete everything on the hard drive before I could proceed, which would have been a nightmare if I had saved anything more to the hard drive, or had been relying on it as my sole archival source. Luckily, I still had my wedding photos on my Dropbox account, so I could reformat the drive without losing anything (3-2-1 already coming in clutch!). But I could see how this would have posed a much bigger problem if I'd had more stored on this hard drive and didn’t have a system set up to regularly migrate my files.
Once the hard drive was reformatted and writable, I created two folders on it: family-archive and alex-archive. Within each of those folders, I created folders for each year starting in 2016, as well as a "pre-2016" folder for any loose ends that have survived longer than a decade. I followed the naming convention guidelines set out by Preserve This Podcast, which was an archiving project created by the Metropolitan New York Library Council. In order to increase the likelihood that my file names will be readable by future technologies, I kept them all lowercase and replaced spaces with dashes or underscores.
A useful piece of advice Note gave me was to start with my oldest files first. "Those are the most fragile, and then you're gonna forget what those things are as far as what you're looking at," she said.
So I decided to start with my personal Google Drive. I sorted it in chronological order and came face-to-face with 19-year-old me. The oldest document in my drive was from 2011, a writing sample for an internship I ended up getting. There was absolutely nothing special about this piece of writing, which was just the text of an article I'd written for the student newspaper, but I was touched to see evidence of my first ever professional application. I downloaded it and saved it to the pre-2016 folder. Then I deleted it from my Google Drive.
Another important thing Note reminded me was that you are in charge of your own archive. You are not beholden to the morass of stuff you have accumulated over the years. You can delete as much as you want and only archive what matters to you. This archive had two purposes for me: to preserve family photos, videos, and documents; and to preserve my work archive as much as possible. I long ago accepted that the majority of my blogs will probably end up lost to link rot on the internet, but I do want to keep a record of the things I’m most proud of making.
I went through the documents and found grocery lists and spreadsheets of job applications (deleted), but I also found my first awkward attempts at fiction and all the videos from a YouTube series I made about side hustles for a now-defunct feminist blog back in 2015. As I downloaded and saved files, I created new subfolders that started to follow a pattern for each year: There was always a "creative-writing" subfolder, as well as "personal-docs" and "projects-and-presentations." The "work" folders evolved based on what my job situation looked like. Some years it was all freelance, and so contained further subfolders for applications, contracts, invoices, and drafts.
It took me three days to get through it, and once I was done, I had an extremely tidy and spare drive, and a respectable start to my archive. My personal drive storage was down to 21.89 GB, though the overall storage remained in the 50s because a huge portion of the storage space I'm paying for is all the email I have, which is an entirely different project to tackle. The prospect of paying Google to store other people's Substack archives makes me want to die, so I will certainly get there one day, but that is not today.
The next-oldest material I had lived on my external hard drives. Buried in a folder within a folder, I found the notes and draft of the first article I ever wrote for the student newspaper my freshman year. There was a "school" folder that included a portfolio I put together to get course credit for an internship, which included stories I had written with headlines like "Snapchat debuts video ... and yep, it disappears!" and "Who said it: Bridget Jones or Congress?" I found a cover letter for a fellowship that, if I had been accepted, would have made me colleagues with my spouse years before we met.
Tackling just the first hard drive was a task that would take all day. Some folders were so stuffed with large image and audio files that it took hours to copy them from one drive to the other. Plus, this oldest hard drive, which I received as a high school graduation gift in 2010, was glitchy; it made a disconcerting clicking sound and kept disconnecting and forcing me to restart the migration process—a strong case for Note's point to migrate across drives early and often.
Which brings me to the final piece of advice that Note gave me: Archiving can and should be a practice and a process, rather than a singular event. I confessed that I was overwhelmed at the amount of material I had to get through, and she told me to take it slowly. "I think just, like, setting a timer and saying, 'I'm gonna work on this for 20 minutes,' it's going to help you kind of move forward with it, rather than feeling like, 'Oh my God, I have to spend the weekend doing all of this,' and making it completely overwhelming," she said.
Note isn't obsessed with constantly maintaining her archives. She backs up her data once a quarter and after any major life, family, or professional events. Once I get through this initial cleanup, I hope I can do something similar.
Maybe you are reading this and thinking, "Damn, this girl is creating a ton of work for herself for no reason," which is a fair and reasonable response. I don't think it's necessary for everyone to undertake a massive archiving project like this, even if they are professional pixel makers like me. Some people hold their existences with a looser grip and are content to live and die and go, and while I envy them, that has always felt intolerable to me. It's why I've kept journals since I was 11 and have saved all of them. It's why I have boxes of old newspapers and magazines stacked in my office closet. I am looking for proof of a life lived, so when I get to the end of it, I'm not asking what it was all for.
I don't know that keeping an archive will actually achieve that, but even at the beginning of this project, it's been surreal to confront the undercooked, unmedicated version of myself. As my archive filled out, I started to appreciate the patterns in my curiosity and work. I've always been a Try Hard interested in other tryhards, and it's comforting to see a summary of my interests cataloged so tidily.
This blog was an impetus to start taking my mountain of digital documents seriously, and there was a part of me that thought I would be able to get through all of them by the time I finished it. But that turned out to be totally unrealistic, so I will continue digging through my ancient files and attempting to preserve them. I'll do it for posterity, for historical record, and for my own ego.
