Personal Digital Archive

A detailed description on how I organize all my personal digital files and records for maximum pleasure

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A well formatted digital archive is like having an external brain of information

The End-goal

What makes the perfect system? It must be

The Solution

After 20 years of working on the perfect solution, I believe finally that it doesn’t exist. There will always be trade-offs and personal preferences. That being said, I believe I have the Marie Kondo equivalent for digital organization

Folder Structure

It begins with a single folder. Call it whatever you like. Perhaps Data, or Vault, or Aaron. No more My Documents. Inside of this folder is everything you will ever want to preserve on a digital system. You will want to create a few very key sub-folders in here

The Notes Folder

There is a snazzy guide here which explains very well what the contents of this folder should be

Everything but the Logs Folder

The other folders, as you can imagine, contain all your digital stuff you may have accumulated over the years. This is normal, and you should of course create a folder for everything that is big enough in your life to warrant its own entire category. Perhaps Programming or Business or hobby or something. But there is a key distinction to make: everything which is not time specific goes into these folders. The things which happened at a certain time, and notice that there is no Images or Pictures folder, they go in the Logs folder

The Logs Folder

This folder is truly a magical place. Inside of this folder, you create a subfolder for each year of your life. I was born in 1994, so I have as many folders as I am years old. Let’s take the 2023 folder. It has the following sub-folders:

These are not the same as the previous ones. Let’s take a closer look at each one:

├── documents
│   ├── Brandwatch
│   │   └── datev
│   ├── Japan-Trip
│   │   ├── after-the-fact
│   │   ├── backups
│   │   └── covid
│   ├── backup
│   ├── jacob-resume
│   ├── camping-resources
│   ├── feather
│   │   ├── Policy Terms
│   │   └── Insurance_application_documents
│   ├── birthday-party
│   ├── medical
│   ├── travel
│   ├── water-filter
│   └── xtb
├── images
│   └── inspiring
├── photos
│   ├── Nova Scotia
│   ├── street-photos
│   │   └── tops
│   ├── birthday-photos
│   ├── ebay-project
│   ├── fundy-foot-path
│   ├── imported
│   ├── japan-trip
│   │   ├── dslr
│   │   ├── from-k
│   │   └── show-and-tell
│   ├── moms-ring
│   ├── phone
│   │   └── screenshots
│   └── secret
├── videos
└── youtube-download
    └── shorts

As you can see, within each folder, there is a distinct organization of a project or moment that happened during that year which is gathered together and easily accessible. In photos, for example, there is a subfolder called phone which contains a backup of everything taken on my phone. However, photos taken with my DSLR are put into their own folder each time, because that’s how I think about them. They are more about the what and less the when. The imported folder contains photos which are sentimental to me, but not taken where I was personally at

Sorting by Name and Date

The exact grouping of these things doesn’t matter too much, but what is magnificent is when you label the filenames in the format of YYYY-MM-DD-some-file-name. This allows you to sort by date even when the date modified or date created are inaccurate. For photos, this is not an issue. For pdf documents, for instance, this is very much an issue. Very rarely do you scan a document, for instance, and it be appropriately dated. Following this schema allows you to find any scanned document, anything gathered from somewhere else, in an insanely short amount of time assuming you’ve organized it already!

Here is an example:

├── 2023-06-20-something.pdf
├── 2023-06-22-something-else.pdf
├── 2023-06-22-something-also-else.pdf
├── 2023-07-05-results.pdf
├── 2023-07-13-prescriptions.pdf
├── 2023-07-23-doctor-1.pdf
├── 2023-07-23-doctor-original-1.pdf
├── 2023-07-26-test.pdf
├── 2023-07-31-vaccine-1.pdf
├── 2023-07-31-vaccine-2.pdf
├── 2023-07-31-doctor.pdf
├── 2023-08-14-cleaning.pdf
├── 2023-09-26-analysis.pdf
├── 2023-09-29-test-results.pdf
└── vaccine-information.pdf

I’ve removed words in there which are too revealing, but as you can see, when I need a medical record, it is so trivial to pull up the correct one. It’s almost fun it’s so organized!

The Logs/YYYY/music Folder

Another trick you can do is put a music folder into the years which go very far back. When you know there is particularly nostalgic music you listened to at that time, then put it in that year’s folder! Now you can look back and not only find memorable photos/videos taken during that time, but also listen to the music and really get into the mindset you had back then. In my case I have been backing up this folder for so long, all I had to do was sort by date modified in my music folder to find the original files from, say, 2003 and voila!

The Logs/YYYY/yyyy.txt File

Each folder has a file with the title of the year inside of it. This is for journaling. If you’re comfortable to do digital journaling, then the perfect way to organize it is like this. Simply write the date between square brackets at the end of the file, and write your thoughts for that day! Over many years, it provides something truly special and unique to go back to. It also helps in the short-term to organize what you are thinking about without feeling like it’s going somewhere that will end up lost and forgotten

Final Outcomes

As you can see, the majority of this requires discipline to keep it organized. Renaming things to keep them following the conventions, moving stuff around, and actually backing up from a phone or other device is time-consuming. But the benefit, in addition to being able to access things quickly, is being able to reflect on your life. You can see your own creative output, or what your mindset was back then. You can put several sections or years of your life into perspective, and consider how you want to shape the future. This is an invaluable asset