actually super basic archival preservation for your personal belongings
label and date everything
dont use adhesives on important stuff they degrade really quickly and can damage things
some paper is much more acidic than others and will degrade and damage things touching it. newspaper and construction paper are the worst and will mess up other papers theyre next to
printed photographs have chemicals that can react really badly to temperatures and dampness and you should keep them separate from other materials
soft and thin plastics also degrade really quickly (unless theyre archival grade) and are the worst to deal with
keep a copy of digital files in at least one separate location (flash drive or hard drive)
personally i think everyone should do this because its worth having a record of your life
a few more things
some inks will fade over time or bleed onto whatever theyre on. archival ink is a thing but there are also just some inks that are more stable
rubber bands break within a few years, paper clips and staples will rust and damage the paper if theyre not made of the right material
exposing photos or any material with colors to light for a while will obviously degrade them over time and theres not much you can to do restore them at that point
you lowkey should print out digital correspondence or materials if you want to keep them long term and be able to find them regardless of what happens to that email domain, website etc. its not uncommon to have printed out email threads in archival collections
these seem to have been more common in the 70s-90s but those photo albums with thin plastic and slight adhesive pages are terrible and will damage your photos and make them stuck forever
this is what acidic paper does to anything its touching after a few decades so watch out
home-burned CD's/DVD's degrade in like 10 to 20 years. flash drives/SSD's need to be powered up now and again to be able to retain their data without getting corrupted (they generally only guarantee data for 1 year without power, although data might stay uncorrupted for a lot longer). Hard drives are more reliable over a longer time of storage.
(i transferred all my old school projects and photos and data and pirated stuff from binders full of burned dvd's to hard drives a few years back and only like half of the files were still recoverable after ~15 years).
