Fifty years ago, when I was a PhD candidate in English in a grad school in Philadelphia, there were no digital alternatives to lowly ink-stained wretches like myself – who were legion. As the concept hadn’t been named as yet, there were no zettelkasten per se as yet. But we had the equivalent, with no special designation or nomenclature. The standard medium was the 3x5 index card (by the user’s choice, either lined or unlined – they were ubiquitous in office supply stores and institutional bookstores on campuses. The truly impoverished used shoe boxes and tab dividers (sometimes home-crafted from “oaktag” stock; sometimes commercially produced). The more flush among us bought sturdy pasteboard or sometimes metal cabinets, usually a single bay, for easier transport, with a drawer of dimensions suitable to the index cards and tabbed dividers. The rest you can imagine. It’s so long ago, I don’t remember what indexing and cross-referencing system I used to record and catalog and manage and cross-index both references (recorded in the prescribed format; in my case based on the MLA Style guidelines) and handwritten notes from research. I wrote at least eight lengthy year-long assignment seminar papers (avg. 45-75 pages) and wrote the framework of my doctoral thesis in this way. I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for, except possibly validation, or perhaps practical tips, shortcuts, and hints for more effective use of the system. Or did you simply want to survey our preferences for one genre of information storage (what you’re calling analog, and what I’d call physical or actual vs. the virtual, executed using digital technology on cybernetic devices) over another? I’ve been using personal computers from as soon as I could afford a commercially viable product – specifically, the IBM Personal Computer I, with floppy drives, 512K of volatile RAM, and Wordstar was the canonical word processing software (and Visicalc the market leader in that new category of application, the electronic spreadsheet) – and I abandoned my index cards, my IBM Selectric typewriter, though I only wish I could say I abandoned physical file storage, a step which came much later, and never looked back. In 1989, I switched entirely to the Macintosh platform, as soon as Apple started marketing a real computer capable of business grade and professional level functionality and efficiency (the Mac IIx). These days I use a variety of note-taking apps, with which I am still familiarizing myself, but mainly, and notably, NVUltra Beta, Drafts, and with markdown capable apps, like Ulysses, for long-form expository writing, and for hard core editing of documents intended for distribution in some publishable form or other, either Nisus Writer Pro (as a word processor), or Scrivener (as a writing project management environment). I also use Adobe InDesign for book projects that include images, and call for more what I’ll call “imaginative” typographic and graphic design enhancement.
For the note-taking, whatever the app I use to record the note (and my sense of which to turn to to record a thought, or a bit of lifted text from whatever source, whether transcribed manually via keyboard or copied and pasted electronically is purely instinctual): sometimes Drafts notes get migrated to NVUltra folders, and sometimes, but rarely, vice versa. I find Drafts notes tend to have a shorter shelf life and get discarded once their usefulness has been exploited or archived elsewhere. Finally, just to keep this fully on-topic, whatever app I’m using, the first entry (and I have a keymapping programmed into both Typinator, which I use on the Mac desktop, and TextExpander, for iOS) is a date and time stamp coded this way: “20210805111317” which is the protocol I learned and quickly adopted permanently after a brief romance with The Archive app, which was also the springboard for learning about the exotic allure of Zettelkasten theory.
But in the end, my mind is still the same one I abused half a century ago, with my packets of index cards, and my collection of pens.
That’s the long of it. The short of it is, I see absolutely no use for myself of an analog Zettelkasten methodology.