this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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datahoarder

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Who are we?

We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.

-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread

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By metadata, I'm talking about things like text descriptions of a photo/video and where they come from, or an explanation of what a certain binary blob contains, its format, how to use it, etc.

The best solution I have right now is xattrs, but those are dependent on the file system, and there's no guarantee that they will stay when the files get moved, especially if the person moving them is unaware of its existence. The alternative is to keep a plaintext file with this metadata alongside every photo/video/binary/etc, but that would be a huge pain to keep in sync since both files have to be moved together.

So my question to you: do you keep this kind of metadata? If so, how do you manage them?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've been burnt by filesystems when moving around between external drives and FTP, so while I'd strongly prefer if there was a universally accepted way to include arbitrary metadata in the file itself, I'm instead using a separate metadata file. My metadata files are named exactly the same as the original, including their original extension, with a ".metadata" appended, to minimize confusion, and use INI/TOML format to maximize the chances that I'll be able to understand and find tools to easily parse the files after several decades.