I just have everything sorted into a folder tree.
It's a mess. It works okay for me because I usually remember where things are. If it's something I haven't looked for in a long time, then I'll have trouble finding it. If I'm desperate I'll use the windows "search" feature on the whole parent folder.

I wish I had backed up more. I had a lot of shareware floppies that are impossible to find today.

Come to think of it, I've never made any modern backup of all the old floppies I have for an Apple II. There's a lot of shareware disks in there as well as the first BASIC programs I wrote as a kid. I wish it was easier to back them up. I'll probably find the disks unreadable next time I try to load them.

I've been collecting stuff from the 90s as well. I had everything organized on CDs first, then switched to DVDs later. One interesting thing to mention is that I had some problems reading some CD-Rs (namely TEAC gold) that were only 3 or 4 years old at the time while some older stuff from 1995 still reads ok today. Haven't lost anything really important (aside from a few old copies of GetRight and CuteFTP 😁), with the exception of 1 e-mail archive containing about 6 months worth of e-mails. That bothered me a lot so I retried the CD and to my surprise it was read by my BD-R a few months ago! This is more than 10 years later after I've tried and retried reading it (at the time I had a bunch of optical devices, sorted to how good their error recovery is - that's how I managed to save most of the stuff from the dying CD-Rs... 😀).

RDRAM wrote:

Most mainstream people i know, only has a single DVD backup of family pictures, I bet most people in here are hardcore backer-up, am i right? . Since i met internet in 1997, i have saved most of my web surfing, from tech stuff, hardware reviews, mods, old softwares, electronic, cars, articles, youtube videos, news, etc since 1997, i've never surfed without save 'em all and I've always made backups: first in Zips, than CDs, now DVDs . I've always had a low speed ( 256kb) but through years it did an huge amount of backups, around 2300 CDs. I could make a little retro-intranet my own, put all the data together in a single hard-disk will take a couple of days, but classified all the files could take a year, do you recommend any third-party tagging software? which one (for win xp)?

I like to hear your own experiences about back-ups, sorry for my english.

I'm the same..I have a habit of backing up everything and have been doing so since the 90's too. I have about 15 TB of storage.

My regular/recent stuff is backed up to a external USB HDD and my old Prolent 1600 which I switch on from time to time.
But most stuff I "archive" onto a HDD when I say "archive" I really mean I don't use that HDD/PC anymore and simply put it in storage. I find all sorts of cool things when I pull a drive out

I have a "Setups" directory on my main hard drive that I share out to the network where I keep an up-to-date copy of the installation files for all the programs I use or could ever see myself using. It's approximately 180GB in size. Everything I have is replaceable though, almost none of what I have has any real sentimental value. I hold on to this stuff for the convenience of having it locally stored more than anything, my internet connection blows chunks.