Beginning in Jr High School, I kept class notes in Steno books, and still have the ones from "key" courses - i.e. the ones that were really interesting and/or were taught by the exceptionally "hot" teachers. (Only a couple in the latter category.)

In college, I used the same format for lecture notes, and continued some regular use later, although the large amounts of correspondence later led to using "Acco" binders for keeping important stuff * 3-hole punched "letter size" pages. I learned quite early that 3-ring binders quickly degenerated into lots of "loose pages" as the hole tore out; but with the Acco clips you only move the last pages being added while the binder is "unclipped."

I have a few files from my first personal home computer dating back to 1981, but never had a computer "of my own" at work until 1992. Most of the "work" I generated on the computer, and key email etc, has been archived in collections of files since I had access to computers, but I continued the "Acco binding" method for things I handled as hard copy.

A lot of the stuff I worked on was "classified" and/or "proprietary," so of course there are some major gaps in my personal archives, since large bunches of stuff simply couldn't be (legally and/or ethically) "exported" from the office(s).

As I no longer, technically, "work," I've continued to keep some personal "logs and archives" but have been working toward keeping NO PAPER, scanning anything needed and shredding the originals.

I've also managed, I think, to convert all of the photos I've taken since I got my first "decent" camera ca. 1970 to digital, and the prints have been shredded. (I still have the negatives, but haven't verified that any of them are still "printable.") Some of the Acco bound archives have been scanned, and the originals dumped, simply because they originally took about 8 linear feet of bookshelf space and were beginning to deteriorate; but it's an extremely time-consuming process so progress is slow. (I've reduced the backlog by about 7 inches thus far.)

I find Word perfectly adequate for text, Excel for accounting, and use low-compression (low-loss) .jpg for scans. A particularly convenient feature in Word is "Insert Hyperlink" since it allows me to create an "Index" document and insert links to other documents/images where the "real stuff" is actually kept. One click, and the other thing is opened. Bookmarks within the index can also be linked to go to general categories within the index. Of course, if you move the file that's linked, the link can be broken, but I havent' found that to be a problem, as I don't usually create the index document until all the stuff has been gathered to an "Archive" folder.

John