A guide to organising your digital life: Archive the past, for future reference

Where to start? Things used to be so simple. You’d take some photos and get them developed. Most of them would be terrible, but that was okay. You’d take the good ones and put them in a photo album that you’d throw in the back of the wardrobe and forget about for 20 years.

We all bought into our new digital lifestyle without much forethought. We swapped rolls of film for memory cards. We traded CDs for MP3s. We ditched VHS for DVDs, then streaming services. We did so with the understanding that it would make our lives easier – and for the most part it did. We also did it with physical photo but my digital photos stored on the cloud will be there forever.

Even if this was true (which it isn’t) it ignores the obvious question: what use is something if you can’t find it?

Take a moment to think about your digital life. Think about what is important to you. Where is it stored? How is it stored? Think of what’s on your social media, in emails, on old laptops, phones, hard-drives, USB keys. We have left bits of ourselves strewn all across a messy digital landscape.

Why are we taking our frustrations out on perfect strangers?

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There is hope. You can tidy up your digital life, just like you tidy up your house. You can put things where you know they will be safe and where you can find them later.

Thinking like a librarian

Is there any profession as misunderstood as the librarian? They are appreciated at a community level. But what do they actually do?

In essence, they take information, store it and make it findable and retrievable later. That sounds simple, but it rarely is. Even storing a book on a library shelf has required librarians to invent a new language; an impenetrable-looking language that allows them to communicate with outmoded computer programs and systems.

But stripping away all the complicated bits, you are going to act like a librarian with your digital clean-up. You will take the information that’s important to you and store it in a clever way that will make it easy for you to find later.

Getting started

Where to start? First of all, don’t think of your digital clean-up as a chore. Think of it as an exciting project, at the end of which you’ll have your own digital archive. You’ll have this archive forever and you can keep adding to it for as long as you like.

To store your personal digital archive safely, you'll need to invest in an external hard drive. If you want to spend as little money as possible, go for something such as the Seagate 2TB with USB 3.0 connectivity that should set you back about €65. Ideally, however, you should think about getting a solid state drive (SSD). These are more expensive but with less moving parts than portable hard drives they don't break as easily. In the long term they are the safer and more secure option. A Samsung T5 SSD with 1TB of storage costs about €220.

One copy of your archive should go on the hard drive, one copy should be stored on your computer and one copy should be stored in the cloud.

If you have old photos, letters or newspaper clippings you’d like to preserve, you should also think about getting a decent scanner. The Epson Perfection V600 is a good choice; it comes with adaptors for scanning prints, negatives and slides, and best of all it automatically restores old photos by removing dust and scratches. It costs about €300.

So now you’re ready to begin. You will be spending most of your time doing one of two things: choosing what to keep (or rather, choosing what to leave out) and renaming files.

Start by creating a folder on your desktop called Personal Archive. Within this folder you’ll be creating many other folders and sub-folders. It’s worth taking time to think this part through. Don’t just dump all your photos into a folder called Photos. Create a folder-within-folder system that makes sense to you. The important thing to keep in mind is you are guaranteed to forget where a particular file or photo has been stored unless it’s well signposted.

What’s in a name?

Renaming files is by far the most important aspect of this whole process. A sensibly-named file can always be found. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to renaming files but you have to choose names that make sense to you.

Paul Manzor of Eneclann, a Dublin-based company specialising in digitisation, archives and records management, suggests keeping the names short and meaningful. "It doesn't matter how great the photo is if you can't find it easily."

If you have photos on your computer, they are probably named something along the lines of IMG_6789 or DSC_0033. You are going to rename every photo you want to keep. It can be both time consuming and satisfying but you have to remember to be consistent.

Jenny O’Neill, a research services data manager in UCD stresses the point: “Consistency is […] key, so if you choose a file-naming convention or folder structure, it doesn’t really matter how you do it as long as you do it consistently.”

What you’re trying to do is attach as much information, or metadata, to the photo as you can without complicating things. If you have a box of old family photos in the attic, chances are that someone has scribbled the date and who is in each photo on the back. That’s what you want to do here, but digitally.

Imagine you have a photo of your daughter on a family holiday in Portugal. You could rename the file Lisbon_20060206_Aoife. So you have the place, the date and the content of the photo in the file name. You don't have to do it that way but if that's the naming convention you go with, stick to it.

Don’t be intimidated by how long it’s going to take. Spend a weekend getting started; try to decide what you really want to keep. Create your folders-within-folders and start adding your newly named files to them. Before long you’ll have a well-organised digital archive to pass down for generations.