Routine: each month, each year, every five years
The short list of things that keep a library in order, grouped by how often, with the date you last did each one.
Essential once the library exists: the monthly items keep the backup current and the yearly sign-ins keep accounts from reaching an inactivity rule. On a first pass, tick the items you did and put the next dates in your own calendar; this sheet records, it does not remind. It is the sheet Routines and handing on uses.
The routine
Tick an item and write the date when you do it. The intervals are this manual's conventions except where a chapter names a source.
How to use this sheet
- Tick and date. Each item has a "last done" date; the date is the record, the tick is for this round.
- The intervals are conventions. Monthly and yearly are this manual's choices, except the yearly check of every copy and the five-year move to new media, which come from the Library of Congress. Convention
- Skip what does not apply yet. With no drive, the drive items wait; write "no drive yet" in the notes.
Ruth Feldman (fictional) does the yearly items when her son David visits: she opens a sample from her Mac's library and from the Time Machine drive, he brings back the drive he keeps at his home, and she updates it before he leaves. Her drive years are on the backup sheet; the first move-by is five years after she bought her Time Machine drive.
A routine done on schedule does not prove a copy is intact; the test on the backup sheet and the checks in Formats and the long term do that. The intervals are not from a study of household libraries; none exists that we found.