At the beginning of every year (or at least within a few weeks of it), I find myself going through my various Eudora mailboxes, moving messages into archives sorted by year and month. I also wander through my hard disks, searching for stuff that needs to be filed away tidily for easy later search and retrieval. As I've relied on my personal computer for work for over a decade and a half, I have accumulated a lot of stuff. And I will continue to do so.
There're plenty of tools out there -- for many platforms -- that try to identify data deadwood and help you regain wasted hard disk space, but that isn't rocket science. There are also rather useful and well thought-out backup solutions out there, but I'm not talking about backup. Building a good archival and retrieval system is something entirely different and requires a great deal of cleverness.
Granted, when this whole personal computer revolution brouhaha began, there wasn't much cause to contemplate tools that help you squirrel away stuff you might need at some later date.
But after years and years of sending and receiving e-mail, not to mention creating all sorts of documents for the various projects I've worked on over time, it seems patently obvious to me that there is a vast opportunity for good archival tools. And no one seems to be working on any of them.
