Yeah I also want to know this, I used to write diaries for years and cherish it, thought I would look back my life or extract something meaningful out of it, turns out I very rarely look at it.
Same goes to old project archives, emails, I have both HDD and S3 Glacier for them, but so far I have never looked at them at all, for 10 years, And I doubt I will look at them in another 10 years.
I am beginning to thinking Letting past go and You aren't gonna need it philosophy towards such things
I'm 52 years old, and I have diaries stretching back to 1980 (when I was all of 9 years old!). Over the years I gradually worked on transcribing them from handwriting to comupter text, and that's made them much more accessible in the present day. E.g., when my father passed away in 2020, it was so easy to just search for "Dad" and revisit long-ago snippets from the past. (And to sadly realize that I'd taken his presence for granted over the years.)
I still regret my roughly ten-year diary hiatus from 1985-1995, losing the bulk of my formative high school/college years in the process. Because as I've grown older, and those memories become more and more distant, I've lost a lot of the day-to-day detail, trivial though it may have been, of my past.
I've been planning to scan my old journals. Waiting for OCR to comprehend my messy writing. Now I think I will read them out loud, record it, speech to text.
