So, I have about 12 GB and I want to fill it with files that need archival.
My criteria are:
At risk of becoming lost
Being usable files without specific hardware (needing a software emulator is fine)
Willing to break my rules if I’m.given better ideas
12GB is small but that just means you might want to opt for links you find useful like ReversalHatchery said.You could probably store a lot of fanfiction and tutorials if its just text. I have had an idea of creating a special storage code that can store large amounts of information in a smaller file size but I am bad at maths and programming and have no idea what I am doing so it might take a while.
In general, this is definitely an area where the best approach is to just find an existing tool for what you need and use that. Especially for text data, compression is a pretty well-studied field and there are plenty of public (and open-source, if that’s a requirement) tools that will do a fantastic job at reducing size. Rolling your own is likely to result in significantly worse compression rates, and if you make an error your data could be irreparably destroyed which you won’t know until you try to access it later.
If your data is incredibly specific you might be able to do better, but it’s usually best to ignore that sort of optimization until you actually need it.