Digital archiving case study

Jane, an amateur family historian, manages her personal digital archive.

Her archive includes:

  • 3 copies of her files, one on her desktop computer, one on hard drive and one on a cloud service
  • a Digital Archive Management Plan document where she documents her archiving process, including her file structure and naming conventions
  • an Archives inventory that lists all of the files and where they are
  • a digital will, in case she gets ill or dies.

Recently she received from her uncle some old CDs which contain photos and documents from family gatherings.

The first thing she did was check her Digital Archive Management Plan document to remind herself of her archiving process. This led her to:

  • create an index of all of the CDs with as much information about each one as she can get from the labels and by talking to her uncle
  • use her anti-virus software
  • think about how she names her files
  • use a bulk renaming app she has installed to name the large batch quickly
  • set up her external CD drive
  • use DROID to get information on the file formats and the file fixity hash number.

Scanning the archives

Jane downloads all of the files into folders named after each CD She virus scans them and runs them through DROID to get their file formats and fixity information.

Now she can look through what she has got. There are a lot of photos, but a couple of documents relating to family events. Many of the photos have no name other than the number from the camera, so she starts renaming them based on the naming system that works best for her, such as:

  • DSC01579615615 she decides will be changed to 45601_Meryl_and_JeffSmith_wedding S06_2015

Checking files and moving them over

Jane also starts looking through the files to see if any are corrupted or not opening. She has checked all the files with DROID so knows what all of the file formats are. She also copied across the hash value from DROID, so she can check if it ever changes as part of her file fixity checking.

She then updates her Archives Index which lists the names of all of the files, their hash number and any other useful information. She has two copies of this Archives Index, one on her hard drive and the other in her Cloud account, she updates both at the same time. Then she can copy the files to her hard drives and to her Cloud account.

Maintaining her personal archive

Jane tries to regularly update and check her archive. However, she is very busy, so she schedules one day a year to check and update everything. Jane regularly checks for file corruption using specialised software called Fixity Pro. When she discovers any files have become corrupted, she restores them from her backups.

Recognising the importance of keeping her files accessible, Jane updates file formats as technology evolves. A few years ago, she converted her old WordPerfect documents to modern Word files.

This meticulous approach ensures that Jane's digital archive is well-preserved and easily navigable for future generations.