Keeping Personal Websites, Blogs and Social Media

If you have a blog, website, Facebook page or other way to share information on the Internet, you also have a rich source of information that you should think about saving for the future.

For this category you need to start any archiving process by first identifying what you have. You might have multiple places where you share information, and you should give consideration to them all.

Archiving Tips

Identify where you have Websites

• Locate all your content on the Web, including personal websites and social media sites and services.
• Be sure to include current information as well as any older (archived) content.

Decide which information has long-term value

• Pick the information that you feel is especially important.
• You can pick individual pieces of information or you can select whole pages or websites.

Export the selected information

• If saving a limited amount of information, you can use the "save as" command in your web browser to export the website as individual files.
• If saving entire pages or sites, check into automatically exporting them as a series of linked files.
• Save metadata for your Web content information, such as site name or date created.

Organize the information

• Give individual files descriptive file names.
• Create a directory/folder structure on your computer to put the saved information.
• Write a brief summary of the directory structure and its files.

Make copies and manage them in different places

• Make at least two copies of your selected information—more copies are better.
• One copy can stay on your computer or laptop; put other copies on separate media such as DVDs, CDs, portable hard drives, thumb drives or Internet storage.
• Store copies in different locations that are as physically far apart as practical. If disaster strikes one location, the other copy of your important web content in the other place should be safe.
• Put a copy of the summary description with your important papers in a secure location.
• Check your saved files at least once a year to make sure you can read them.
• Create new media copies every five years or when necessary to avoid data loss.

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