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Comment by tqwhite | Hacker News Reader

Also, as an old person, I will tell you that 1) I got my first personal computer in 1979 and have been trying to keep my bon mots archived ever since. I have tried a million things and have learned one key lesson: It's not really worth it.

I literally have a footlocker filled with old disk drives (remember, since 1979!) and I have never, ever gone back more than a few years, hell, more than a year.

Now that disks are big, I keep a lot of old stuff. I have, eg, screenshots dating back to 2015. Email before then. And so so much more.

I have never gone back more than a few years.

I will continue to archive because I must but, Old Person to Young People... Don't put too much effort into long term availability. It's not a good investment.

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Similar perspective, but I'd offer a minor tweak. Just as before gmail people spent a lot of time "managing" their email. Gmail allowed us to stop bothering and just use search to find stuff among the now-messy volume of email. It works pretty well.

Similarly, I'd say save everything, but spend no time on organizing it, relying on search and ai/future technology to find what you want from among the mess.

Similar thought after many years of trying to be "organized". Search is what matters, make sure the tool or format of storage allows for easy searching.

I'm a big fan of general search.

> Also, as an old person, I will tell you that 1) I got my first personal computer in 1979 and have been trying to keep my bon mots archived ever since. > I literally have a footlocker filled with old disk drives

I had a private mailing list for 15 years and had emails squirreled away across several hard drives. I archived them all to my Mac, under a directory under /, and tossed the disks. Was too broke to have another disk for backups.

Then Apple decided in a upgrade to trash everything not-Apple under /. Archives gone. No warning. Really amateur move by them. Grrr.

A triage system is essential to determining your archival strategy! We can produce information faster than we can produce information storage systems, so we need to be discerning! Random gibberish is less valuable than a screenshot you took in 2015, and that screenshot from a decade ago is probably less valuable than your tax returns or your treatise on the meaning of life! If it's worth keeping, it's worth putting some time into every few years to make sure it's copied somewhere.

You might reconsider your stance. As LLMs get increasingly more powerful at making sense of all kinds of data, these old archive can suddenly become incredibly useful.

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