I'm an informaion packrat. Not only do I collect books, and have an obscenely long and completely unorganized bookmark page (four, in fact), but I'm a nut about saving personal data. I never trash email, old writing assignments, digital photos I take (even the bad ones), or anything that has the slightest chance of being needed or wanted later. I've been putting a lot of thought of late into the data formats I use. Last semester Microsoft Word kept flaking out on me, and I got in the habit of writing assignments in HTML. After making a good stylesheet it's really pretty easy to do, and has the added benefit that I can put a URL on every assignment, link them all to the web site, and be able to view and print from any computer on the net, without having to worry about fonts, versions, or obsolesence.

Still, archiving is not an easy thing. My current frustration is with email. Two years ago I finally forwent all desktop email applications and relied completely on Pine. Now, for various reasons, mostly having to do with the way Pine files emails, and secondarily having to do with the hurdles I have to jump to handle most attachments, I'm going back to Outlook Express (or possibly Entourage). I'm also, at long last, dumping Best Internet (aka verio) as an ISP since all I use them for anymore is email and that is not worth $29.95/month.

Back to the point, I save my emails, and I'm currently archiving last year's emails. Realistically looking at the frequency I'll want to mine data out of these archives, I'm not worrying too much about the format, as long as I get it on to a couple redundant CD-Rs in text, .gz, or .tar.gz format, so I can always grep (or gunzip -c * |grep zgrep (thanks Benjy) ) the stuff I want out later. Heck, by the time I want anything from there I'll probably be using Mac OS X regularly and I can do it all in the shell. Or I could always use BBEdit.

On real-world archival RAID systems: I'm thinking I'll burn three CD-Rs, each with 2/3rds of the data I'm archiving, then copy all three discs and send the copy down to SoCal. That way as long as two discs survive in any single location I can reconstruct all the data.

I think way too much about this stuff. I know you're thinking it's only email (and school assignments and the like), but I can't understand people who throw their email away after reading it. I guess I'm on the side of the fence that sees email as correspondence instead of just conversation.