[kwlug-disc] Documenting your digital life

[Chris Frey]

On Tue, May 20, 2025 at 02:02:04PM -0400, John Van Ostrand wrote:
> Do you keep detailed notes of household information? If so, what do you use?

I use mediawiki for my wiki documentation.  But since I store that
in the cloud, and since it is more complex to get going than a simple
document in cases of disaster recovery, I don't store super-private
information in there.

I have found that it is useful to split my wiki into 3 main categories:

	Howtos - straightforward single page documents on how to make
		something work

	Projects - storage of details for tasks that span multiple days
		or years, things you'll keep coming back to with fresh
		data, notes, or updates... can have subpages if needed

	Logbook - year and date oriented notes of things that just don't
		have a home yet, but that you don't want to lose...
		I find I remember such things by timeframe anyway, so
		might as well store it that way.  It also alleviates
		clutter, since I have a proper place to store any random
		tidbit that crosses my path, getting it out of my
		browser tabs or email backlog.

And of course, it's a wiki, so all these things can cross-reference
each other.

I back it up with rsync and a mysqldump that gets flattened into a git repo,
just in case I need to go back in time due to some externally caused
loss of wiki-history.

- Chris