Fully built - now tame the chaos!

And that from someone who works in IT :rolleyes:

Come on, speak into my crystal ball. [emoji5] Pdf/a files and ODF are currently intended for long-term storage, but whether that will remain so, no one really knows. It just takes a trade with a newer and more practical format, and the software crowd will switch, and you can only hope that your old clients (AdobeReader and co.) still run on the new systems. So you have to convert your data into the new format. I experienced that as a fresh student when accounting discovered PDF for itself ... it was absolutely not funny.

We may be going off-topic, but I can still open a DOC file from 1990 today. Standards don't disappear quickly; just take a look at MP3 or the JPG format.

They are all about the same age (almost 30 years on the market), dozens of alternatives have come along, certainly some that are better, yet they survive.

And whoever is afraid that a PDF will eventually become unusable can simply use TIFF, which will last a few years longer. By the way, the current version is from 1992.

And this has little to do with a crystal ball, but simply with what the market dictates. There will always be a few people jumping on another bandwagon, but the majority will stick with what works. And I could actually name you plenty more examples of "typed" products that disappeared into oblivion after a short time, even if they were perhaps slightly better.

Name me a standard format from the past that can no longer be opened today?

Name me a standard format from the past that can no longer be opened today?

Difficult, since the real standards have been established since the 1990s ;)

Did you destroy the originals afterwards? Does this also apply to notary and loan agreements (if available)? What about manuals (in which the craftsman later puts a stamp during maintenance)?

.

I destroyed invoices and similar documents. However, I also filed and stored some documents.

In Google Drive, I have a rough folder structure but almost exclusively use the search to find things. On my computer, I no longer have any folders and throw everything into "Documents"...

Name me a standard format from the past that can no longer be opened today?

None comes to mind immediately. But do I really want to take that risk for such important documents? Not everyone is knowledgeable enough in IT to keep track of developments.

And when I look at how fast development cycles have become nowadays, I wouldn't be surprised.

Conclusion: I would always keep the paper documents and at least mothball them in a box.