I have an archive folder with about 10 GB of data. This is old data that I do not use on a day-to-day basis but, at some some point, may need. I keep one copy of the folder on an external HD not attached to my Mac mini. I keep another copy on OneDrive as online storage only (ie not synced to my computer). I plan on storing another copy on Dropbox using SmartSync so that this folder will also be online only.
I tend to keep a lot. I am slowly going back through and cleaning out stuff. I used to backup up to CD ROM each year and also any major projects. Any time I do a conversion to a new computer or a major operating system change I verify and update the old files. I am slowly implementing a backup on AWS as well as in house on hard drives especially since many sets of things are now larger than CD ROMs can easily hold.
Yes, future proofing is a big issue. We may have archival media that lasts but the drives, drivers and hardware to read it may not. I did finally get rid of my old microfiche reader a few years back. I had actually gotten a lot of reference material I bought on microfiche. Film formats can be fragile but in may cases better than data drive formats.
That is something really want the potential new Paperless from MacSparky to address. Future proofing the files.
FWIW I’ve had older PDFs that are now not readable, so plan on converting/opening them up regularly too.
I am sure not. The digital formats are especially prone to loss that way. At least old punch cards can be manually read by a human, slow but possible. Microfiche can be read under almost any decent microscope in a pinch and so on. I can’t read old bernoulli drive cartridges, or 8 inch floppies no matter what I do without the hardware.
And then you run into massive privacy issues. There is an advantage to distributed, isolated systmes in terms of basic security.
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Yes @OogieM it would be a good idea if @MacSparky covered future proofing or touched on it maybe. He has so much ground to cover and I am not sure how much of a priority it is to most people? It is to me.
A lot of important stuff exists in several formats. Things do disappear of course over the centuries, though it is amazing what remains. I actually wasn’t aware that pdf’s could become unreadable. I am, of the view, by the way that we all keep far too much really. I am thinking it through at the moment. I have said elsewhere that I doubt if I keep more than 4 photographs a year. I use photos for noting things but don’t keep them. My wife hardly keeps any photos but probably several times what I have.
I went off Twitter and FB partly to reduce my papertrail. I found there was way too much stuff out there, which really should have been ephemeral. So that is something totally on the other side of this coin. Too much stuff we don’t mean to keep really. I had someobody screenshot some stuff of mine at one time… for a ‘gotcha’. The “Nixon” problem you might call it.
This is a complex social and even cultural topic and one slightly beyond the brief here I believe. Nice to touch on it though. The interesting point about punch cards and microscopes sparked the train of thought for me that there are degrees of preservability: that hadn’t occured to me. There were, it must be said, similar problems in the paper era, well in the ‘clay tablet’ era too 
Before maybe we ask 'how much space can I afford on the cloud" we should ask how much ‘stuff’ do I need to keep really? By that I include third rate music and other audio.
Those of us that keep data on offline disks need to remember that the data does fade with time. Offline hard drives should be exercised every year or two. My policy has been to clone offline data from one drive to another once a year.
And I only recently learned that offline SSDs apparently lose data even faster and need to be powered up and used ever six months or so.
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I didn’t know that either!
Older school: I took the time to collect all the essays I wrote for my undergraduate degree, put them all into a book and had it printed off hard cover at Lulu. Now they all sit on my bookshelf making me feel all proud. 
It’s actually quite a tome. Hard to believe a student writes that much in a few years.
As for the original question, yeah, keep them. There’s no physical footprint to deal with, and then you can go get them whenever you need them, should the need arise. Storage is pretty cheap.
Based on my past experience where I have wished I still had access to older files I had deleted, I no longer delete any completed work.
As has been mentioned, create an Archive folder with appropriately named sub-folders for files you no longer “need”.
I store my archived files on my NAS and on BackBlaze. Drive space for the NAS is relatively inexpensive and of course, BackBlaze is unlimited. To do this you can either copy your archive, if not too big, to an external drive from the NAS, which then can be backed up to BackBlaze - or do what I do, which is to add a BackBlaze B2 account where you can directly backup your NAS shares.
You could try Documents by Readdle. I seldom use it but it’s pretty flexible and handles ZIPs quite well.
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I have found, mostly by what I get told I admit, is that ios has some way to go on files. I don’t use ios that way. I do find surprisingly good for Ulysses and DEVONthink and for photo/note taking that kind of thing. But as a central file system, no. I have LaTeX which I don’t know will even run on ios: I don’t think it will. I could keep all my files and pdfs on ios if I wanted ironically: I only have about 4 GB. Including some misc. things in DEVONthink which are ephemeral.
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I am going to be buying a Synology soon, possibly partitioning off part of one drive for archival purposes. Currently I just have stuff lazily scattered all over a 6TB WD drive. I do have Hazel, just haven’t had time to create more rules.
I was reading about Synology’s newish Synology Drive (2.0) package that essentially duplicates e.g., Dropbox functionality but via your own NAS, rather than e.g, Dropbox’s servers.
I haven’t tried it out yet, but apparently it includes both the ability to download files on demand – i.e., have files appear on your mac but only download ones you want to use – and also version histories.
https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/help/SynologyDriveClient/synologydriveclient
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