The Archiver's Nexus
Centralized Hub for Data Hoarding & Digital Preservation Resources.
I lean more toward "digital archivist" than "data hoarder" — the difference being intent. A hoarder collects indiscriminately; an archivist collects deliberately, organizes it, and makes sure it survives. This page covers why that matters, how I approach backups, and the tools I actually use.
Why Bother Archiving Your Own Data?
The internet feels permanent, but it isn't. Services shut down, companies get acquired and gutted, videos get taken down, and links rot within a few years of being posted. If a copy of something only exists on someone else's server, you don't actually own it — you're just borrowing access to it until they decide otherwise.
A few reasons people get into this hobby seriously:
- • Preservation: keeping personal photos, family videos, and digital history safe from a single point of failure — a dead hard drive, a deleted account, a company shutting down.
- • Data sovereignty: not being at the mercy of a streaming service's licensing decisions or a cloud provider's terms-of-service changes.
- • Access reliability: local, self-hosted copies don't care about your internet going down or a subscription lapsing.
- • The hobby itself: there's a genuine satisfaction in building out storage systems, organizing a collection properly, and knowing exactly where everything lives.
My Backup Philosophy
There's an old saying that gets passed around in backup and data preservation circles: "One is none, two is one." The idea is that a single copy of anything isn't really a backup at all — it's one hard drive failure, one accidental deletion, or one fire away from being gone for good. Two copies gets you real redundancy, but you're still exposed if both fail at once or live in the same place.
That's why my baseline is at least three copies of anything I actually care about, not just the two some people stop at. It's a simple, low-risk standard: the more independent copies you have, spread across different drives, systems, or locations, the less likely you are to ever lose something for good.
How This Relates to 3-2-1
This isn't the same as the formal 3-2-1 backup rule (3 copies, 2 different media types, 1 offsite) listed in the resources below — think of it as the simpler, personal version of the same instinct. If you only remember one rule, remember this: two copies is the minimum before you can call something backed up, and three is where you actually stop worrying about it.
Tools & Resources
Curated tools, communities, and storage tech for data hoarding & digital preservation.
The Internet Archive
Non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Visit Archive.org →Anna's Archive
A shadow library search engine and centralized collection for open-source book and academic data.
Visit Archive →ArchiveBox
A powerful, self-hosted web archiving tool to save snapshots of your favorite websites.
Project Homepage →Wget
Non-interactive command-line utility for retrieving files from the Web using HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols.
Get Wget →qBittorrent
Free, open-source, and ad-free P2P client for efficient and private file sharing and archiving.
Get qBittorrent →Transmission
A fast, easy, and free BitTorrent client that is highly popular on Linux and Mac.
Get Transmission →Youtube-DL / YT-DLP
Command-line tools for downloading video and audio from YouTube and thousands of other sites.
YT-DLP Project →Plex/Jellyfin Media Servers
Software solutions for organizing and streaming personal media collections.
Plex Jellyfinr/DataHoarder Subreddit
The primary online community for data preservationists and hoarders.
Visit Community →ZFS/Btrfs Filesystems
Advanced filesystems offering integrity, snapshots, and complex RAID configurations.
ZFS Info Btrfs WikiTrueNAS/FreeNAS
Leading network-attached storage (NAS) operating systems for data integrity and sharing.
Visit TrueNAS →MergerFS/SnapRAID
Solutions for merging multiple hard drives into one large pool with parity/protection.
MergerFS SnapRAIDM-DISC/LTO Tape
Physical media solutions for ultra long-term, cold archival storage (100+ years).
M-DISC Info LTO Consortium3-2-1 Backup Rule
A critical strategy: 3 copies of data, 2 on different media, 1 offsite.
Learn More →BorgBackup
A highly efficient, secure, and deduplicating backup program for local and remote data protection.
Get Borg →Rclone
The command-line tool for managing files on cloud storage (S3, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.).
Get Rclone →