It is presumptuous to assume that my life is important enough to need documentation.

I write a journal and recently i have been organizing my photo archive with embedded captions, tags, gps, etc..

I dont think anyone will ever care to read this stuff. Maybe some llm in the future will be able to digest all of this so a curious descendant might be able to ask questions to it like what did Terminal do for work or some such thing.

I've been trying to find a good way to do so, but I'm still not there. I usually struggle with the fact that my memory is completely horrible, and I often worry about living without even noticing what has been going on with my life.

I'm currently trying to stick to a daily entry on obsidian, but it does not seem to be working yet 😢

I mostly don't. Maybe this isn't the kind of answer you were interested in. I think memorable experiences are transient and are more beautiful the more fleeting they are. The more I try to immortalize some moment, the less I feel I'm able to enjoy it in the moment. There are some exceptions. I keep recipes in Google keep. Most of them I just know how to make but I might need my memory jogged for a measurement or temp setting. I also have a small notebook I use as a gym journal. "Journalling" seems like a stretch for the chicken-scratch numbers, though. It's mostly so I know how much weight to use next time I go.

A follow-up question on this topic, how often do you guys go back and check out these memories? Because I seemed to have developed an habit of clicking videos and photos but never checking them and when I check them after a long while, I literally have 0 memory of that scene.

I think It's one thing to have these memories stored somewhere digitally and one thing to have them registered in our heads. It's an odd feeling when you look a old video and feel "did I really do that?" Does anybody else relate to this?

I have a personal MediaWiki installation on my computer (same software as Wikipedia). Been running it since 2022. Most recent offsite backup is from the start of December. I also have a very Wikipedia-like writing style as a result, too.

Any of my descendants, if they will ever exist, will probably have a great time going through great-grandpa's writings 🙂

screenshot of Special:Statistics. WARNING: LIGHT MODE

The pages figure doesn't sound as impressive when you realize a lot of them are templates imported from Wikipedia lol

Hell, this month I made it into a Kiwix Zim file that I can read when away, but of course that doesn't support writing to it, so I sometimes write in a physical logbook when I'm away from my computer

I'll take pics sometimes. 🤷

I take pictures of the architecture around me.

The mundane stuff that no one bothers to document and won't make it into historical architecture books.

I have over a hundred gigabytes of liminal space photos I'm debating whether I should share on Lemmy or not.

I used to write in physical journals for years (1998-2008ish) but kind of fell away from it after that. Couldn't assign it to habit anymore. From 2004-2010 I kept a LiveJournal but drifted from that too, only log on once every few years to post an update.

Now I just use Daylio to record vague daily updates about my mood, health, activities, etc.

Maybe eventually I'll pick up a journal again but that'd have to be when my daily life gets a little more predictable.

Mainly my shitty memory. I have photos of events like family meetings, birthdays, holidays on my phones SD card. I manually save things like contacts, not-so-important notes to my SD card. Copy my stuff to my PC every now and then (2 mo. usually). My important notes are on paper written with a several-thousand-year-old script.

I use a digital journal (Logseq) backed by write-only git repositories, syncthing and the 3-2-1 backup rule. This contains info about my days, struggles, friends and family and regular introspection.

Photos and videos usually get carried over from one phone to the other, synced with my home server, also 3-2-1 backup rule, and every 3y I'll archive stuff to free up space.

Interesting knowledge usually gets shared by me via https://wiki.tilde.fun/. I often link it to friends and colleagues when they ask me to explain stuff. Sometimes I also copy articles I write for corporate knowledge bases after work into my wiki in a more sophisticated form. I tend to not cater to 5-year-olds in my personal wiki, but it's inevitable in a corpo setting where you have people with no experience at all.

How do you do it?

I try to identify the most unusual thing I encountered every day, then I take a two second video of the moment.

Weirdly, chat logs and friend conversations.

Whatever I've told them and whatever I said somewhere, it's a pinpoint recollection of where things were at for me at the time.

I write a brief journal entry each day. Would have loved to read the day-to-day musings of past generations in my family, so I'd like to do this now for posterity. I even designed a custom printable planner with space for it, Letter/A4 sized so I can easily scan them in once I'm done. It's just a section of my planner so the context of what I did that day is right there and the limited space keeps me from feeling pressured to write in gory detail. Printed out because the digital equivalents never really worked well for me.

That only captures a small amount of my life and I'm not big on taking photos, but even a brief daily journal entry takes much discipline, so I won't push it and risk giving up.

While I like to consume documents and photos on paper, I don't trust it in the long run. Vulnerable to water, fire, UV, and theft. You could say the same for electronic media, but it's easy to duplicate, encrypt, and verify with checksums (or replace if it fails). All of my photos and documents to date fit within 128gb with room to spare, so I store encrypted copies on hard drives at home, a SSD hidden among cables and chargers at work, on my personal laptop, and in a microSD in my wallet. All verified with btrfs scrub and synced at my leisure.

Bought an automatic-feed scanner to gradually digitize the hoard of paper documents and photos I have remaining. I ought to look into digitizing old home VHS tapes from my childhood and backing up the really important stuff to M-Discs sometime, but that's all I have time for now.