One problem with creating a preservation path is that it requires continual renewal of the digital material being preserved. Personally, this would make creating a preservation path an annoyance, particularly with personal documents. Nevertheless, preservation paths seem to be pretty easy to create. Here’s the steps I’d take:

  • Keep and maintain all relevant files regarding important documents such as papers, photos, music, digital media (video games, movies, etc.) on my main hard drive
  •  This would include all rough drafts and revised drafts. Especially when it came to my academic papers, having rough drafts could be of historical significance in the future
  • Take all the sensitive material and copy them to at least one portable hard drive. In addition, creating CD’s of music or copying some items onto multiple flash drives would be preferred.
  • Copy said information onto at least one cloud source. More than one cloud source could be preferred for a variety of reasons: it would increase security (if iCloud was hacked but all my sensitive information was on Amazon’s cloud service, it would help), save space on cloud services that require a payment if you use over a certain amount of space, and some cloud services could be more convenient than others for certain media (Steam, for example, can back up information to all your games linked to your steam account)
  • Lastly, for certain information, it may be best to produce hard copies, such as tax records, bill statements, photos, and music (CD’s)
  • Depending on the files in question, I would semi-annually check to make sure they are still accessible. Certain files, such as tax records, would probably be very important to check, while others, such as music, would probably be check per my own self interest
  • About every 5 years (aka: when I get a new computer ever 3-5 years), I would make new copies/update the old copies. Updating them could mean, for example, taking an old microsoft word document originally written in a previous version, downloading it, updating it with the newer version of microsoft word, and then uploading it back to a cloud service