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Comment by rwbt | Hacker News Reader

I've recently started using Fossil[0] to archive all my personal data. It works rather brilliantly. Technically you can use any VCS but Fossil is unique in that the entire repo is a single SQLite db, so it's very easy to backup and restore. Not to mention the web UI to have a quick glance before checking out any files. Even better I can sync flawlessly between multiple hard drives and computers. I've a few separate branches for Docs/Photos etc. I checkout the related branch and just add more files whenever needed. After files are added to the repo, I just remove the working copy. There are some limitations though like files larger than 2GB aren't supported.

[0] - https://www.fossil-scm.org/

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Fossil's also very easy to put online, needing at a minimum a two-line bash file to function as a CGI script.

Maybe more relevant to private data, the builtin wiki makes a good personal knowledge database.

The next version of fossil will have a forum (seen already at https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forum ). With the time sorting for threads, that might be good for temporal data that you wouldn't want to put in a wiki.

Something I didn't know is that the US Library of Congress considers SQLite databases to be long-term storage formats, on par with CSV and JSON: https://www.sqlite.org/locrsf.html

I do the same thing (store all my personal data in Fossil). I like that I can save a file in markdown format and it's rendered automatically when I view the file online. (Not unlike Github, but Github is a proprietary service.)

For my purposes, I don't see any advantage of Perkeep over Fossil. I know when I use Fossil that I can trust my system and that I will always have control of my data, and that reduces my stress levels. I have enough things to worry about without worrying about my data disappearing.

I don't use the feature very often, but Fossil supports unversioned files, which allows me to delete a 500 MB file from the repo if I no longer need it.

After your comment on file storage, and star-techate's response to you about using it as a personal knowledge database, I am surprised that I don't hear about Fossil more often.

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