A Digital Archive – Train of Thought

I wonder how many other people out there want this too? I have, on my various computers:

Email, mostly complete, since about 1993 (ish)
My music collection
A few years of photo albums

What I’d like is a way to store that lot, in a vendor-neutral fashion, and then access it from most IP connected spots in the world. It’s the vendor-neutral bit that seems to be hard. My music is all hidden in iTunes, and for a long while, my email was trapped in Outlook.

However, this weekend was a practical first step. I brought up an IMAP server, and started transferring all those archives (over 10 years) to it.

I copped out – having tried to run an OpenBSD server, and hack around on Mac OS X client – I just bought Mac OS X Server, and installed it on my desktop. About 10 minutes later, the server was running. When Apple make it easy, boy do they make it easy! I can access the archive via SSL/IMAP or SSL/HTTP, so most internet connections can reach it. By far the best is my Mac client – spotlight for over 10 years of email is awesome!