How often do you revisit locally saved Internet files and webpages? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2023, 06:51:21 am
content: Been cleaning some disks, and found various directories with saved for later. All kind of files, projects, schematics, PDFs, webpages, some crawled websites, etc. You'd be surprised how few of them are still online today, 10-20 years later. Even more surprising is how many of them seem now irrelevant.Do you have similar data hoarding habits?If so, does the saved data look obsolete now, and how often do you revisit your archives? Ever happen to come back and make some project you postponed years ago, or read some pdf/article you saved back them?

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2023, 01:39:31 pm
content: I always keep a local copy of datasheets, that way I will always know where to find them.

author: RAPo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2023, 01:43:36 pm
content: I put all my websites on getpocket.com. Index and archive them with keywords. Looking back articles when needed which can be as often as 3x a week,

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2023, 01:59:27 pm
content: I always have all major datasheets, specifications and documents with every project I do. Even if it means having duplicates. Getting a datasheet from your own hard drive is much easier compared to trying to find it online. I'll probably have quite a few datasheets that can not even be found online nowadays.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2023, 02:10:18 pm
content: Datasheets are always useful, indeed. Was asking more about those kind of files one keeps saving them on the Desktop, or inside the Downloads directory for later, then once in a while after they pile up too much, make a new "Desktop YYYY-MM-DD" folder somewhere and move them there to clean up the desktop, and so on repeated over years.

author: ataradov
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2023, 03:20:02 pm
content: Datasheets always. I archive different revisions, so I download them occasionally, but most of the time I use a local copy. Archiving is nice because you can never find full archive from the vendors and sometimes things get mysteriously added or removed.Actual schematics/projects - almost never. Except for the schematics for the vendor EKs, again for the same archival reason.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2023, 05:45:29 pm
content: Generally no, but as a professional matter, I have taken to downloading datasheets of components selected in the design, at least when I remember.A downside to always referring to one version, is missing the errata and other updates, say in MCU data.A couple of websites I've logged, either for local use (a calculator or two, implemented by clientside JS--how convenient), or for reference. Very few; but in factone such reference I've kept onlinerecently caught the eye of its original author, who was impressed to see it ~two decades later.Backups/history, duplication of data (whether by same, or by being included, in part or in whole, in other files, in the normal process of combining things to create output), and generally accumulating data as the project goes on, can get quite expensive, in a certain sense*. A lengthy project from a couple years ago takes up nearly 900MB; a lengthy current project is now over 2.2GB. Much of which is Altium bloat -- backup/history is saved as whole-file ZIPs, so there's a lot of repetition, especially of bulky items like 3D models.*A gig is a lot of data, in terms of human senses, I would say. You could pore over that, as raw bytes, for an entire lifetime; or look at it through various views / parsing as the various formats it is. Or, if it were converted to raw video (not that it'd be at all intelligible as such), several minutes worth of modest HD quality.Tim

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2023, 08:41:45 pm
content: Web site content - very, very occasional. Possibly some documentation or article in HTML, never whole web sites.But tons of datasheets, articles, scientific papers in PDF.