Archiving papers: a strategy

I’m helping a friend archive a lot of notebooks and papers that they’ve accumulated over several years of writing. They’d like to be able to travel, but are a little worried that not having any backup for all this work is risky; fires, floods, and theft do happen, so even a fireproof box isn’t a guaranteed backup.

We’ve therefore been photographing the papers, page by page, and creating a 3-2-1 backup of all of the digital photos. After some experimentation, we’ve come up with a workflow that works very well:

• Create a Photos library that is not the primary. (She has an art business and needs to be able to use her iCloud-synced Photos library without it getting cluttered up with hundreds of photographs of pages.) This is most easily done by holding down Option and launching Photos. When the “select the library” dialog comes up, create a new one.
• Photograph the items on a second iCloud account’s primary Photos library. This automatically syncs them to that accounts iCloud Photos.
• On the machine where the secondary Photos library lives, log into iCloud.com with the second account.
• On that same machine, open Photos with the non-primary library. (Hold down the option key and open Photos to allow Photos to select the non-primary Photos library.)
• As batches of photos are taken, wait for them to sync to iCloud, then on the iCloud.com page for the second account, download the batch to the machine where the secondary library lives.
• Create a new album in that secondary library, and drag the new batch of photos into it.
• Put a sticker on the notebook/folder, and write in an ID (A, B, C, etc.) and the date it was photographed last. This allows active notebooks to be archived safely. (You should also add a note on the last page scanned with the date and album ID so you can cross-check.)

Photographing the cover of the notebook/the file folder the pages are in helps make sure that you keep different batches of photos separate. If you do this, it’s much easier to keep track of which pages belong in which album, and gives a better way to track back which things are done and which aren’t.