What stinks is I haven't found anything satisfactory in terms of archival software that runs locally. For now, I shove things into folders in external drives, but directory trees are very poor when it comes to categorization and retrieval.
File systems with their directory or folder hierarchy are poor organizers of files. Searching for files is a huge hassle.
File systems, which were designed over 50 years ago when storage was measured in MB, need to be replaced by object stores that are much better at organizing and finding data.
Ripgrep Anything or whatever it is called is pretty good for finding things, at least as long as I can restrict the search to a not too huge subset of my archive.
I also have org-mode documents full of links to interesting files, and sometimes to locations within files.
A bit messy, but I do not want to have dependencies on any special software. My oldest files have been with me since I first started hoarding on 360 kB DOS floppies.
The last time I traversed a folder tree with over 100 million files, it took more than 30 minutes to complete.
A properly designed object store can find everything in less than a minute.
I wish there were more people organizing around Perkeep and breathing life into it.