Regarding having my documents accessible throughout the years...
(this story sparked my mind)
Recently I have been archiving all my old documents and projects I have been working on in various archives and document formats. I have a few questions so I can maximize the lifespan of these files so I will be able to read them in years to come.
First off, what format should I be saving them in? Recently I have been drafting my documents in Pages and it seems like the format will possibly disappear sometime. I understand it is just gzipped xml files and such, but is this okay? Should I export everything as PDFs? HTML? Word documents? I am so lost with regards to which format my files to be in.
Another thing.. I had a serious misfortune when I threw all my documents into a tarball a long time ago and ended up losing all the resource forks (sorry if this is totally incorrect, I am new to unix/etc). This same thing happened to me with .rar files. My question: What format should I be archiving my files in? ZIP? RAR? TAR? I need something that will keep the integrity of the file, the folder structure, etc. I dont want to lose all my resource forks/extensions/&c. and have my files be confused as to what they should be opened in.
Any other thoughts would be much appreciated. Thanks.
dav
(this story sparked my mind)
Recently I have been archiving all my old documents and projects I have been working on in various archives and document formats. I have a few questions so I can maximize the lifespan of these files so I will be able to read them in years to come.
First off, what format should I be saving them in? Recently I have been drafting my documents in Pages and it seems like the format will possibly disappear sometime. I understand it is just gzipped xml files and such, but is this okay? Should I export everything as PDFs? HTML? Word documents? I am so lost with regards to which format my files to be in.
Another thing.. I had a serious misfortune when I threw all my documents into a tarball a long time ago and ended up losing all the resource forks (sorry if this is totally incorrect, I am new to unix/etc). This same thing happened to me with .rar files. My question: What format should I be archiving my files in? ZIP? RAR? TAR? I need something that will keep the integrity of the file, the folder structure, etc. I dont want to lose all my resource forks/extensions/&c. and have my files be confused as to what they should be opened in.
Any other thoughts would be much appreciated. Thanks.
dav