Cleverfeets / Digital estate
What is a digital estate?
A digital estate is more than a folder, a disk or the computer in front of you. It is the accumulated, connected body of files, systems, records and relationships that continues across devices, storage and time.
01 / Accumulation
How a digital estate grows.
An estate grows through ordinary acts: creating a file, copying it to another computer, moving it to different storage, making a backup or replacing a device.
Older systems and retained copies can remain part of the same history. What began together may end up distributed across locations and moments.
02 / Understanding
What location can tell you.
Knowing where something is stored can help you find it. Searching or organising it can make it easier to reach. Neither, by itself, explains what it is.
Understanding asks different questions: where did it come from, what does it relate to, and what place does it have in the longer history?
03 / Continuity
Relationships provide context.
A record may make sense because of the people, places, events or other records connected to it. Those connections provide context.
Provenance is the evidence of where something came from and how it changed. Continuity means being able to follow that history as it moves through copies, systems and time.
04 / Time
Time and continuity.
Each device change, storage move, migration, backup and retained record can add another layer. The present is therefore only one moment in an estate’s history.
History does not stay where it began. It can outlast the computer, disk or system that first held it.
05 / Cleverfeets
What Cleverfeets is for.
Cleverfeets is being built to make a digital estate easier to see, understand and tend across devices, storage and time.