What is Arcyve?

Personal data is mostly digital, and it is all over the place. Without care, most of it will be lost over time: cloud services end their service, data from old computers is not recovered, obscure file formats cannot be read, hard drives die...

Today's solutions are islands, and/or they suck, and/or they are for hardcore nerds only. There is cloud storage. There are smart backups. There are APIs, and Exporters, and NASes, and #selfhosted tools, and long-term preservation file formats. So you can easily end up with a hot mess of backups, or some lost data, and anything in between. Not talking about easy access to the data that you store, finding that one picture that you took 20 years ago on that no-name digital camcorder which had a photo function, or the voicemail that grandma left you before she died, and so on, and so forth.

I believe in the value of your personal data. In the "value for you as a human" sense, not in terms of "value for corporations that sell your data". It is worth it to have your life's data, for as long as you want it, in the place that you want it, in the format you want it. Your personal digital history. Your Arcyve.

Arcyve is an ambition which might become a project. Arcyve starts as collection of existing building blocks of "self help" advice, tutorials and software. Many smart people have been feeling the same pains and built amazing solutions for parts of the problem. Let's start by putting these together. I'll share the full vision of what Arcyve could become in a later post.

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