Hi! I read your post about report cards and I hope I'm not being insensitive, but can you talk a bit about your "digital archive"? Do you have all your documents in a cloud? Or on an extrenal drive? Its very intriguing. Thanks!
Oh sure. Hope it's ok that I posted this publicly! It's not insensitive at all, I often take away details like that from posts about other stuff :D
I used to keep paper copies of various important documents -- bills, etc -- and I still do keep copies of vital stuff like my birth certificate and home deed. But I reached a point where I just didn't want to deal with paper anymore; it's hard to store, hard to find once you've stored it, heavy, messy, tends to fall apart eventually. So these days if something paper comes across my radar I either scan it or decide it's not worth scanning and throw it out. And some stuff never shows up in paper at all but still needs to be stored somewhere, so I'll save a PDF copy and then file it in my digital archive.
The archive lives on my personal laptop, on the hard drive. It's split into a lot of categories; I have "taxes" which is then broken out by year, I have a small file for each home I've lived in, I have one that has all the cats' medical information in it, one that has all MY medical information in it, some other files for various records. A lot of ephemera, like event tickets or receipts from really special meals, I scan that in and rather than save it, I'll put it into a "yearbook" I make each year and have printed by Shutterfly.
My actual photos are kept separately from the digital archive but are usually sorted in a similar way -- by year, then by event within the year. I clean the photos off my phone pretty much monthly, which makes this easier. (This month I pulled all the photos off my phone, then created a "Europe trip" gallery and re-uploaded a bunch there for the purposes of showing off :D I also have a gallery dedicated to my niece, with backups on my hard drive).
By policy I don't keep important documents in the cloud, although I probably could, it's secure enough these days. As I said, the archive lives on my laptop, but because it is so important and really because EVERYTHING that lives on my laptop (photos, movies, music, etc) is important, I'm extremely rigorous about backing it up -- I have an external drive that's slightly larger than my laptop hard drive, and I back up my entire laptop every week on Sunday afternoon.
