Digital Preservation: Personal Preservation
What is Personal Preservation?
Personal preservation is “...preserving any digital collection that falls outside the purview of large cultural institutions.”
--Ashenfelder, M. (2015, August 3). The Personal Digital Archiving 2015 Conference [Web log post]. The Signal. Library of Congress. Retrieved from https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2015/08/report-on-the-personal-digital-archiving-2015-conference/
In this case, personal preservation also refers to professional research data and documents that are not at a University-level but that are still relevant to faculty work. The strategies provided here apply to University resources, but may also apply to your own personal/home files.
Back-ups
1. Local: your local machine
- Desktop, laptop, tablet, etc.
2. External: an external drive
- Available through ITS
- Set up automatic sync
- Macs: Automator app
- PCs: Setup for backing up content to another drive
3. Cloud: VT Google Drive
- Unlimited storage
- Automatic sync with the Chrome Application Launcher for Drive (by Google)
Resources
Guides
- Personal Archiving (Library of Congress)
- White Paper on Best Practices for the Capture of Social Media Records (NARA, May 2013)
Tools
- Online-Convert.com or a free trial with BatchConverter: batch file format conversion
- MD5Checker: verifying checksums
- WINMD5Free: verifying downloaded files' checksums
- Web-Capture.net or novaPDF: screenshotting websites and saving them as PDF/As
Manage your data
- Monitor your back-ups regularly to ensure they are operating properly
- Set reminders:
- Every year: Check your preserved files to ensure you can still open and read them
- Every 5 years: Migrate copies to new storage spaces
- Verify your checksums
XKCD on Digital Data
Courtesy of XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/1683/
Why preserve personal data
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| "Saving" doesn't mean you can open it in the future |
Time-consuming process to appraise, organize, migrate files, and set up storage and syncing |
| Technologies can fail or become obsolete |
Requires long-term maintenance and staying up-to-date on basic preservation standards |
| You may want to access or modify data after it has been submitted to VTechWorks, VTechData, or another institution | Requires storage space |
| Helps in preparing content transfer to University-level preservation environments |
Data Preparation Process
- Know your data
- File format: determines the ideal preservation format
- Size estimations: helps choose external and cloud storage and prepare for additional storage
- Security: who has access and any access parameters
- Organization: find it later
- Document your process
- Google docs or something similar
- Keep track of everything above as well as your chosen technologies and any resources
- Prepare summaries and descriptions of each major directory to keep within the directory
- Prepare for always increasing your storage
- Assuming you are always creating material and wanting to preserve it, your storage will also need to increase regularly
Data Appraisal
Appraisal up to you, but here are a few things to consider as you sort through your files.
Long-term
- Final paper drafts
- Multiple dataset versions
- Final presentation drafts
- Videos
- Photos
- Final metadata
- Files eventually intended for University preservation
- Descriptions of what is preserved
Short-term
- Temporary files
- Working/incomplete files
- Multiple paper versions
- Multiple presentation versions
Preservation File Formats
File formats evolve or become obsolete, and new formats are developed. Ideally you want a non-proprietary, lossless file format. Current best practices for file formats include but are not limited to:
| Text | Portable Document Format (PDF/A) |
| Plaintext | Plaintext (TXT) |
| Image | Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) |
| Audio | Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE) |
| Video | Matroska Multimedia Container (MKV) |
| Multi-namespace message box (MBOX) | |
| Website | WebARChive file format (WARC) |