My own intricate system of 4 git repos to manage dotfiles, bash initialization, cli tools/scripts, and system state.

The last one keeps track of installed packages and “dotfiles” out of the home directory (system config files like /etc/hosts).

as one of their customers, I second this

I don’t have a specific recommendation (I could just give out names of tools that seem to match your needs but I can’t really say I’ve used any), but in your place I’d reconsider your last requirement of “no connection to the DB”.

In my view the best docs are the ones that take the least effort to keep up-to-date. Consider a tool that’s able to dynamically list and extract schemas from your existing tables and generate a nice HTML or diagram that can be used as a quick and up-to-date reference. That will require little or zero maintenance compared to a manual diagramming tool. So I’d start looking there.

Depending on the project and usage I’d also consider exposing the database through an API. This makes documentation much easier too, as there are tools to auto generate API docs and you’ll decouple your DB schema + access from its usage, which has its own benefits.

Is there a web archive equivalent to github repos? At least for the most popular ones.

I know there are hard copies in Svalbard’s seed vault, but they’re more for a one-in-thousands-of-years post-apocalyptic scenarios than this.

if you need less than 4TB just get a solid state

“Desktop OS” also counts laptops. Unless people are working from their smartphones, I don’t think desktop is collapsing at all.