How to plan for a fruitful archive visit and manage your research data every step of the way? This presentation introduces basic archive know-how, useful organization tools like Zotero and Tropy, and many tips and tricks for researchers heading into their first archival visit. Presented as part of the two-day workshop "From paper to files: how to efficiently digitize (historical) documents", which took place at KU Leuven on November 22-23, 2022. The workshop also introduced participants to other parts of a practical workflow for acquiring and processing physical archival materials, including photographing documents with cellphone cameras and performing optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR) using tools like ABBYY Finereader and Transkribus.