Personal Digital Archive Toolkit | National and State Libraries Australasia

Personal photos, papers, music and videos are important to us. They record the details of our lives and help define us. But increasingly our possessions and our communications are no longer material: they’re digital.

Digital files are encoded to represent text, images, audio, video and more. They are fragile and completely dependent on software and machines to make them accessible. We can preserve our digital possessions and keep them accessible for years to come, but we have to archive them and actively manage them.

No matter what type of file you want to save – audio, video, text, photos, emails, and so on – they all require the same essential preservation strategy:

  1. Identify what you want to save
  2. Decide what is most important to you
  3. Organise the content
  4. Save copies in different locations.

Source: Personal Digital Archive Toolkit | National and State Libraries Australasia