Creating a Personal Archive

I’m not too concerned about running out of storage space, since text files are very compact, so, rather than taking unnecessary time to sort through ones I may want to discard eventually, I’ve found it easier to simply save them all.

Some topics are of immediate or continuing interest and I would like to access these more readily. I’ve found it useful to create separate folders for these—and subfolders by date (so that files with the same name [number] won’t be accidentally overwritten by another article).

The example below shows articles saved in the main archive by date on the left, a folder containing information about “Heart” issues in the middle, and the contents of the subfolder named by date (5/17) within the Heart folder on the right.

The text files 93, 103 and 181 were Option-Dragged from the full-day’s archive folder into the Heart subfolder 5/17 to create duplicates (copies).

Hint: A neat trick to save/duplicate text files into different folders without having to find the original text file to drag (from the “All” folder, for example), when using Tofu to view/speedread a bunch of text files, simply “grab” the file icon from the Tofu Title Bar and Option-drag it into the folder. This will create a duplicate text file without the need to find the original!

As you might expect, Option-Command-Dragging the icon will create an alias (“Shortcut” in Windows terminology) of the file instead (Option-Dragging creates a duplicate).

While it’s possible to create aliases (shortcuts) instead, creating copies ensures that these files will be kept intact even if the original full-day’s archive folder is deleted in the future.

This scheme has worked very well for me for years but, of course, you’re welcome to create a personal archive structure that will work best for your needs.