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Is There an Existing Comprehensive Archiving System for the Mac?

I am currently struggling to construct an overall archive in my Documents folder for many years’ worth of emails (already in various Mail mailboxes), text documents (Pages and other word-processing documents, PDFs, research material (including scanned newspaper and magazine articles and miscellaneous webpages) and image files. At the moment I have two main folders: a subject archive and a date archive. As I create, receive or download a file, I insert a date (yyyymmdd) at the beginning of any existing title which I change to an abbreviated version denoting its origin and subject. I then put the original version in its appropriate subject folder and leave an alias in the appropriate date folder. It’s cumbersome, I know. And I can’t think of a quick way of transferring incoming and outgoing emails into this system. Can anyone suggest an alternative home-made system or an existing Mac app that will do the trick!
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David Girling

Comments: One Response to “Is There an Existing Comprehensive Archiving System for the Mac?”

    7 years ago

    As for files, I would stick to just the subject folders. No need for the date ones. You can always create Smart Folders, or just do a search to find things by date. That's much more versatile and will be easier to maintain. And if you are using dates in your titles, then you don't even need to rely on created/modified/open dates stored in the file metadata.
    As for emails, the way I do it is to NOT do it. I use Google's email system (Gmail) which provides enough storage to just archive everything. Every email is just archived. No special folders, no tagging, nothing.
    Then I just search for something if I want to find it later. Zero effort on the front end, and it is usually easy to find something later on. I've never had to work that hard or have failed to find something. I suppose you could use some tags (AKA labels) on the messages, but that's a lot of work on the front end.

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