Blaugust 16 - Archiving

Your art is important. I think a lot of people fall into the trap thinking once it's on the internet, it's forever... oh yeah you'll totally go back and save your work. NO. DO IT NOW!! "But gg8473, the internet is forever!!" NO!! I do not believe that!!! Things can go in a moment. Yahoo sites, livejournal, tumblr... Communities can be lost, your art... can go in but a moment...

I talk a lot about archiving your work on my socials, but how do we do that? It's kinda overwhelming, especially if your work is all digital. But, you start somewhere. And today is that day. I'd say start small, like backing up your artwork by year, or trying to get into the habit of downloading a fic you like when you've finished it. It's habits!! Once you get the file system set up, it's a lot easier than going oh my god did I download that? did I back that up??? when you return to your harddrive months or years on. Yes. YOU HAVE TO NAME YOUR FILES!!!! NAME THEM!!!!!

NOTE: everything, cloud or physical storage, may fail out of the blue. Services like Gdocs can suddenly change their contend policies, and your trusted external harddrive can go poof! Life's scary...

Physical or Cloud

Both. Multiple if you can.

Both come with a cost, and both have pros and cons. I'm currently degoogling and it's the ONE THING I'm going to miss... Cheap storage space...

DO NOT USE DISCORD OR NEOCITIES/NEKOWEB AS A IMAGE/FILE DUMP. Christ. This is against neocities and nekowebs policies and results in a ban lol, but it's so fucking stupid. Baby's first storage idea. Discord can go. Webhosts can go.

Cloud

This is tricky to talk about. I think you should also have cloud storage, but have it physical first. Currently, most of this services are adding AI slop or being invasive about that files are being stored.

• GDrive. You can do the old multiple accounts trick to bypass the free storage if needs be.
• Mega
• Proton Drive. I use proton myself and I like the service, but they suddenly added AI and the userbase is furious -- Techboys and their toys ruining everything for the rest of us, huh?

If you want to see more, check out this comparison table.

External hard drives

Users choice. Pop into your local electronics shop and they should have them, amazon or any other online store. Your basic 1TB comes up to around €70/$80. 2TBs come up to €120ish. I know that's a lot of cash upfront, but for your piece of mind? Priceless. You can wait for sales. Nowadays you can get 8TB or 10TB external hard drives that come up to the ballpark of €300.

I personally rather having separate 1TBs drives, just so I can have multiple backups. You can spread out payments as well. I got my first two back when I was in college! And they're still good. Though I'm planning to get another for art backups.

Thanks to princepúca for the fujo stickers <3

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Because I'm too woke, and am deep in the hndr line mines, I'm going to download and archive a bunch of fanfic today from ao3. Since I have my harddrive plugged in, I'll do some art/gamedev backups ^^

This is my system, and it can be as organised as you like it. I like to be very detailed, but I might be on the extreme end lol

My basic system is:

• General topic (Art, animation, film, music, fics, personal documents, artbook/zines)
• Subtype (For art: sketches/comics/illustrations/zines; for fic: fandom/trope/cws)
• Year
• Month (this is for art, since I have CSP EX, I use the comic feature as my monthly digital sketchbook)

That's a basic system, this of course can change to fit your tastes and what you're archiving.

Art files

Now I'd love to lie to you and say I do this every month. I back up my clip studio paint files every few month. Probably every 6. I forget, and time passes me by. I do do it whenever I've finished a big project (games, comics etc).

But when I booted this up, I must have done it last month when I tried to transfer to Linux.. (pats myself ont he back)

Then I break art down into years. To me this is perfect, but you might break it down by media types or whatever makes sense to you.

And then the months! As I said before, I use the comic feature on Clip Studio Paint as a digital sketchbook, and I break it up into months. I'm not a massive illustrator, so I don't have a folder for that.

But I do have one for my comics/doujins... I call it doujins because I'm a weeb.

Text files

We're using fanfic as our example. This is a little simpler.

• Fandom
• Ship
• Rating

ao3 thankfully makes downloading fic easy. You can download fic as an epub, pdf or html file! The latter is great if you want to backup your own fics and post on your own wesbite. Kingdr has a tagging template and a css template for writers!

It's so satisfying... It does take time to set up but it's sooo worth it later down the line.

I hope my little ramble inspired you to take archiving your work seriously!! I was once the type to just succumb to fits of depression and delete... everything... o)-( I regret it! Even if you don't like it now, you will always be happy you saved it! Your work is wonderful and deserves to be cherished!!!

Listening to...

Oasis weekend in Dublin! I can't wait to sit out the back with some cans and hear the concert from my gaff. Life's good...

I finally transferred domains to porkbun, and I'm gonna be on neocities while I search for another host o7 Have a nice weekend!

--xoxo becky