How to Preserve Your Own Digital Materials (Library of Congress)

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/

This site provides some tips to help make your personal "born digital" information last. The guidance is basic and is meant to be a place to get started.

Personal Digital Archiving (Cornell University)

http://guides.library.cornell.edu/digitalarchiving

This guide from Cornell University is based on the workshop “Personal Digital Archiving”. It discusses strategies and resources that will help you in managing your personal archive.

Guidelines for creators of personal archives (Paradigm Project)

http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/appendices/guidelines-tips.html

The tips range from making conscious decisions about naming and format when you create a file, to the deletion of low value material in order to free up storage space and make it easier to find what you are looking for. There is also advice about backing up, and administering and caring for your computers; and for safeguarding both your own privacy and that of others.

Preserving Your Family History Records Digitally (FamilySearch)

https://www.familysearch.org/techtips/2011/09/preserving-family-history-records-digitally

This paper by Gary T. Wright discusses the benefits and challenges of using digital preservation to both augment and enhance the preservation of your family history records. It also presents solutions to the challenges, identifies what types of family history records are suitable for digital preservation, and summarizes what is required to get started archiving digital records.

Personal Archiving

http://www.personalarchiving.com/about/

This site exists to document developments in the field of personal archiving, and to support a broad community practitioners working to ensure long term access for various personal collections and archives.

The Digital Beyond

http://www.thedigitalbeyond.com/

The Digital Beyond is a blog about your digital existence and what happens to it after your death. We’re the go-to source for archival, cultural, legal and technical insights to help you predict and plan for the future of your online content.

Digital photographs

Four Easy Tips for Preserving Your Digital Photographs (Library of Congress)

http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/10/four-easy-tips-for-preserving-your-digital-photographs

Four simple steps to start you on the digital preservation path.

Keeping Personal Digital Photographs (Library of Congress)

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/photos.html

Including how to transfer photos from your camera to your computer.

List of photo sharing websites (Wikipedia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photo_sharing_websites

The list is non-exhaustive, but is limited to notable, well-known sites.

Image Permanence Institute

https://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/resources/forms-image-deterioration

Forms of image deterioration.

Web sites, blogs, text messages, and social media

How to Backup Your Social Media Life (Fast Company)

http://www.fastcompany.com/1695794/how-to-backup-your-social-media-life

How can you download your stuff on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Flickr? Not all of them make it easy to get out what you put in. Here are the best ways to export and archive your social media life on the most popular networks.

Tools for archiving social websites (Your Digital Afterlife)

http://www.yourdigitalafterlife.com/resources/tools-for-archiving-social-websites/

Many of the social websites you use probably have your content locked up in some way. These products and services can help you manage and/or archive your content so you can back it up properly. We don’t endorse these tools so use at your own risk.

How To Save A Complete Webpage For Offline Reading (makeuseof)

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/save-complete-webpage-offline-reading

This article offers tips on saving webpages in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.

Archiving Cell Phone Text Messages

http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/04/archiving-cell-phone-text-messages/

Tips on how to save text messages off a cell phone.

Make a Local Backup Of Your Gmail Account (Wired)

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Make_a_Local_Backup_Of_Your_Gmail_Account

This wiki provides tips on storing backups of your e-mail on your local machine. The page also has links to making backups of other web-based e-mai services.

Back up your data (Archive Team)

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Introduction

The site offers tips, links and other information about archiving personal data.

Recovery tips (DriveSavers Data Recovery)

http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/company-info/recovery-tips

The site has put together strategies to ensure critical information is protected from corruption and loss as well as guidelines to avoid permanent data loss.

Online Storage Services Review (TopTenReviews)

http://online-storage-service-review.toptenreviews.com/index.html

Our comprehensive product reviews and articles on online storage services can help you choose the best service to disaster-proof your data.

iCloud Showdown: Apple iCloud Vs. Its Top 5 Competitors (CRN)

http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/cloud/231000202/icloud-showdown-apple-icloud-vs-its-top-5-competitors.htm

Comparison of top five cloud storage service providers.

ReNamer

http://www.den4b.com/?x=products&product=renamer

ReNamer is a very powerful and flexible file renaming tool, which offers all the standard renaming procedures, including prefixes, suffixes, replacements, case changes, as well as removing contents of brackets, adding number sequences, changing file extensions, etc.

Belvedere

http://lifehacker.com/341950/belvedere-automates-your-self+cleaning-pc

Use Belvedere's friendly interface to create advanced rules to move, copy, delete, rename, or open files based on their name, extension, size, creation date, and more.

Bulk Rename Utility

http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php

Bulk Rename Utilityis a free file renaming software for Windows. Bulk Rename Utility allows you to easily rename files and entire folders based upon extremely flexible criteria.

EMET: Embedded Metadata Extraction Tool (ARTstor)

http://www.artstor.org/global/g-html/download-emet-public.html

EMET is a tool designed to extract metadata embedded in JPEG and TIFF files. EMET is compatible with Mac OS 10.4+, as well as Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Metadata Extraction Tool (National Library of New Zealand)

http://meta-extractor.sourceforge.net/

This tool is designed to extract metadata from a wide variety of common file formats, including GIF, JPEG, PDF, MP3, and MS Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint). It works on Microsoft Windows computers.

File format description and usage (University of Cambridge)

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dataman/resources/File_Formats.pdf

This document describes different file formats and gives recommendations on their usage and archiving.

Standards for file formats (Paradigm Project)

http://www.expertisecentrumdavid.be/davidproject/teksten/guideline4.pdf

The document describes file format parameters and their use and also gives advice on converting electronic documents into archival file formats.

Digital audio and video records (National Archives)

http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/initiatives/dav-faq.html

Although this resource addresses Federal Agencies, it provides useful information about audio and video formats recommended for long-term archiving.

Conversion Software Registry (National Archives, ISDA, NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

http://isda.ncsa.uiuc.edu/NARA/CSR/php/search/conversions.php

Web-based tool to find software to convert files from one format to another. This web accessible application will allow you to enter the file extension of the format you want to convert from and the format that you want to convert to.

Free Online Image Editors (JISC Digital Media, UK)

http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/stillimages/advice/free-online-image-editors

This advice document looks at free-to-use online image editors which let you work on images via your internet browser. As these free image editors are web-based, you don't need to install anything on your computer.

101 Tools to Convert Video, Music, Images, PDF and More (Codswallop)

http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/post/conversion-central-101-tools-to-convert-video-music-images-pdf-and-more

Check out this list of 101 tools that will allow you to convert just about anything.

Aid4Mail

http://www.aid4mail.com

Aid4Mail is an easy-to-use, fast, and highly accurate email conversion program.