[ale] End of year digital clean up?

[Solomon Peachy]

On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 12:49:05PM -0500, DJ-Pfulio via Ale wrote:
> What do you do every year to clean up your data, email, photos, 
> documents, ebooks, backups, retired credentials?

Email, photos, and other "personal" data I keep indefinitely.

I keep my credentials in one place (the "pass" tool [1] is really awesome) and
immediately delete stuff that's obsolete.

I treat electronic "documents" the same way I treat paper stuff; most of 
the time they're kept for a specific legal/record-keeping reason, so 
they need to be kept organized until they are no longer needed.

 - Everything tax-related I'll keep for seven years.
 - Purchase/Sale/Maintainence records relating to durable assets
   (eg real estate and vehicles) I'll keep as long as I own them, and only
   purge the year after they're disposed of.  Or longer if the transactions
   have some bearing on taxes.
 - Medical records are kept indefinitely.
 - Old insurance policy paperwork I tend to trash immediately, as only
   the current policy matters.
 - Statements (utilities, credit cards, bank, insurance, whatever) I tend to
   only keep for about a year or so, though I keep the paperwork on the 
   account creation and any changes to agreements that come along the 
   line.

I keep one month worth of nightly rotating backups using rdiff-backup, 
automatically purged, but my photos/videos (and other bulky things like 
that) are backed up separately/incrementally onto Blu-Rays.  Stuff 
that's not yet on optical media gets included in the rotating backups.

> How do you find these things later?

For email, I keep my archives organzied quarterly, but most of the time 
I just use 'notmuch' [2] to find things. For Photos/Video, I use 
something mostly homegrown, but there are many decent CMSes out there.  
For Documents, find/grep, or just thumb through my filing cabinet.  :)

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/714473/
[2] https://notmuchmail.org/

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
                                      @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
High Springs, FL                      speachy (freenode)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20210104/61b9efd5/attachment.sig>