> Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder

Stop worrying about a well collated archive and just dump everything in a suitable storage medium. I've got years of random side projects and pretty much every photo I've taken going back many years. It's a complete mess, with various duplications, it's just not that big (few hundred GB maybe? I'm away from home so can't open up my NAS and look) so not worth my time to optimize it.

On the flip side it's fun to randomly browse through and take a trip down memory lane. When there's a particular thing I definitely want can be more of a pain to find than if I had any decent organization but that comes up rarely enough that I don't really care.

> Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder?

Step 1: Get a NAS or whatever, and copy over things manually when you know you care about them.

That's pretty much it for at least some basic protections, and not starting a whole project. Just made checksums before you send it, and verify the checksums after you send it, and that's pretty much it.

Then step 2-6 can involve doing encrypted off-site (cloud) syncing of your backups, automatic backuping and so on, but as a first step, just do something small and easy, so it won't feel like a hassle in the future.

For code, this hasn't been so much of a problem since Github made private repos free. Dump a copy of every piece of code you write up there, and you'll be a lot less likely to lose it...

I’ve always found that the default hacker advice is was a bit too complex for my taste. If I’m someone who hardly cares about archiving things - I’m not suddenly going to care about setting up a NAS/Ceph/Backblaze/S3.

The lowest friction tool for me for nearly a decade now has just been iCloud. It helps that I use Apple products everywhere (and I even have iCloud installed on my windows machine), but I just default to storing things in iCloud.

Searching is not the best but I’m confident the files are there

https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep and a Backblaze bucket (or other S3 compatible target). Can always search, organize, retrieve in the future as sibling comments have mentioned. https://rclone.org/ for when you need to forklift data around.

Three things that have bitten me recently:

1. beware of encryption, especially Microsoft and Apple. I've encrypted Apple disk images with lost passwords, and USB drives that I'm not sure I'll ever decrypt now that I've mostly moved to Linux

2. USB drives rot. I have at least one sitting on my desk that doesn't work, or doesn't work with Linux, or is encrypted, I can't tell but I think it's dead and I've no idea what's on it

3. assume anything other than text or open formats will be useless later. I've a ton of info archived in closed proprietary formats that I might never be able to access.

Duplication is inevitable. I've a box of CD/DVD archives, a dozen large USB drives, two NAS, and half a dozen computers, and with all that storage and space I can't even have a definitive music collection. It's on both NAS, multiple computers, an MP3 player, my phone, and all the copies are different. We've 14 terabytes of photos, and so I now need to buy another NAS to replace the two I have and keep the old ones as a backup. It's endless curation, both for hardware and data.

And yet, the code I've lost. The photos that didn't make it to backup. I have those regrets too, like they were truly valuable.

Final thoughts: cloud storage isn't storage, it's short term for shuffling data between devices. Even email isn't secure - Yahoo deleted all my messages without warning because I didn't log in for a year.

Make a data partition or folder, put all your files there. Do some basic organization. Then back it up regularly, using a tool you find easy enough to use. It’s not hard once you get the hang of it.

As far as software projects go I'd say GitHub or whatever VCS you prefer. For photos and documents etc you could look into cloud storage like OneDrive. A friend recently told me about filen.io which provides a similar service but with encryption. Not sure whether OneDrive also supports encryption.