How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

I have media going back 50 years. A common theme is all of it becomes unreadable after a while - not because the media degrades, but because you can't get a device that can read them (or it becomes very expensive to obtain such a device). Punch cards, paper tape, magtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, PC hard drives, cartridge tapes, DECtapes, zip discs, hard drives, etc.

The easiest by far solution is to simply copy them forward to new media once every year. Have an offsite copy.

I don't trust any cloud backup. They can go dark at any time for any reason, you can lose your password, you can get "canceled", a hacker can ransomware it, etc.

I periodically check that ransomware hasn't infected my backups by seeing if an unrelated device, like a media server box, can read the files on it.

I have no faith in "archival quality" media, as if you can't find a device to read it, it's worthless. Have you noticed that computers increasingly don't come with CD drives anymore? Why would anyone want them, since a 64Gb USB stick goes for $6? Soon there will be no way to read those "archival quality" CDs.

I simply print the photos I want to keep, and put them in photo albums like my parents and grandparents did before me.

I don't expect my children to be able to explore my digital archives when I'm dead in 50 years or so, so anything I want to be found then I print or otherwise place on a physical medium that's readable without computers. The less important stuff can stay archived on hard disks as plain files on a FAT32 filesystem. With a physical label on the disk describing the contents.

I think the best way to hand that stuff off to your children is to wait until they get to a point where they hand off can happen, when they are adults, and then hand them a highly curated set of photos on a USB drive and let them do with it what they will.

The key is in the curation though, it is unlikely that your child will want to sort through thousands of blurry, duplicate, or unrelated photos. 100 really good and special photos/videos are better than a mixed up mass of 5,000.

If you are concerned with passing away before your son is of age, just make sure there are multiple backups, and the sign in information for anything that isn't local is communicated to his guardian.

Keep it simple. No raid or weird filesystems, no special NAS computers, no encryption, no remote services. I stuff every computer I assemble with hard drives until it can support no more then mirror important data from every computer to every other computer with rsync.

I have two pocket SSDs that I archive to on an irregular basis (basically quarterly) of selected documents and photos. Each is in a small faraday bag, whichever one is in the house is in a safe, the other is in a safe deposit box at my bank. The drives themselves are unencrypted but some of the documents are encrypted (e.g. I export my 1Password vaults quarterly and encrypt those). I don’t have any kids nor plans to have any but have lost about 30% of the digital stuff I thought I was keeping safe (through bit rot, fading CDRs, regrettable document retention policies I was unaware of).

My advice would be to cut selected items to an SSD on a routine basis and either stash it in the family safe or wherever you keep important files. Use an existing filesystem, not whatever the latest newfangled vendor specific one, and use a fairly well documented format for images. Store documents as text or rtf.

By letting it go. I used to horde, multiple formats and offsite... then I just let it all go. I've got a local copy of files on my machines plus a backblaze copy, that's it, I don't need tens of terabytes of data I'm almost certainly never going to use.

If you're ready to share all that, and it's just family photos&videos (nothing too sensitive that you won't mind them leaking through ordinary bad security and social media), then you could give them access as soon as they have their own online accounts, and they could just grow up always accessing it.

But, for financial/estate data that my heirs might eventually needed, I have a script that `rsync`s select data to (multiple copies of) an unencrypted external USB drive, in FAT32 format.

Included on the drives, and also stored printed with them, is a one-page `READ-THIS-FIRST.txt` file that says what info is on the drive, as well as top-level summary about other things they might need to know (like what insurances I have, any will, and how to access the GnuCash files).

There's also a PDF&paper one-pager assets&liabilities report from GnuCash, for use before anyone gets around to installing GnuCash. This enumerates all the accounts where money is stored or owed, and sets expectations for the reader's very-very tiny inheritance.

There's also passwords. Mine are currently handwritten in a redundant pair of Rite In The Rain paper notebooks, one off-site. But you could also use a password manager service, and some services can release more passwords to family members upon your expiration. Your survivors being able to just one of those accounts, might save them a lot of headache, and you don't know which one that will be.

Even for only family photos that they can already access, you even might want to have a one-pager bus-factor document that includes things like how to keep the photos from disappearing (such as by not getting locked out of access, not failing to pay a cloud service bill, or not donating the old junk servers that were storing them). If this one-pager is accessible to kids, maybe structure it as notes for yourself of how things are set up, like an engineering nerd, without alluding too much that they'll someday need to do it.

NAS and SSD, multiple copies. I don't know if I'll get to the point of archiving on Amazon Glacier or something similar but that's always an option. Having just gone through a funeral for my dad this summer I can say that having non-digital images (photo prints, negatives, slides) doesn't always yield the most durable image. Compared to the possibility of storage devices failing I think digital images will be far more durable than previous analog formats... having those in a format and location where the next generation will know to find them is another matter. (For example: how long before the images I burned to archival quality DVDs cannot be viewed because no computers ship with optical drives and external optical drives are getting harder and harder to find?)

Homelab with ZFS and ~60tb racked. It backs up to a second box in the house. I occasionally swap drives with a nearby friend.

Homelab runs photoprism (open source google photos alternative), plex, code-server, etc.

On this topic, does anyone have recommendations for good and relatively affordable home NAS hardware? A lot of the ones you can buy with all the bells and whistles included are quite expensive and the cheaper ones out there look kind of shoddy. I bought a little kit for turning a Raspberry Pi into a NAS device using a SATA hat but the connection seems dodgy or something as it doesn't recognise the hard drives persistently. Shame because it looked quite good.

A bigger question is indexing that content. I would pay good money for a software suite that would let me scan all my old family photos and attach both text and audio. I'd love to sit down with my mother and one-by-one go through them and let her record the story behind them. I don't understand why such a format doesn't exist.

I am pretty simple when it comes to archiving data. I archive my blog posts and writings using archive.ph. For storing other type of content (images, etc.), I use Icedrive[0], which provides enough storage for me to store important images and other data.

[0]: https://icedrive.net

Im surprised more clouds dont let folks put credit into their accounts. I used a smallish openstsck based provider LunaNode for a little while that had a "wallet" one had to pre-pay into... conceivably one could just pay-in-advance the estimated rate for the next couple hundred year. You'd have to find a provider you trust to stay around.

We can iterate from there. Wouldnt it be sweet to be able to let other people dump more credit into your provider wallet, so it could keep going? Maybe we could standardize a "end of service" webhook/notification, and your website & content could jump ship & re-instamce itself on another provider automatically if your current one declares it's going under.

Dont forget to setup after-life DNS too!

I use PhotoSync on my iPhone to copy the original photos from iCloud to my Mac.

Then I have two 5TB LaCie Rugged drives that I just attach to the Mac. Finally, using ChronoSync to schedule copying contents from the Mac to both drives as mirrors.

I just keep them on a local fileserver, and do backups of that as normal.

I have all my private data backed up appropriately on a NAS, in the cloud, etc. When I'm gone, whoever has access to my accounts, inherits my stuff, buys my property an estate sale, etc. can do with it whatever they please.

However, for the digital content I have published, such as our podcast, I plan to form and fund some sort of trust that will be tasked with keeping it online and publicly available for as long as possible. This may just mean making sure it is archived in at least one library, the Internet Archive, etc.

I recently zipped all my photos ever into one ~400gb file (along with a .txt file list). I have the photos 'online' at home and a copy of the zip archive at home, but the cloud copy is in AWS where I pay about $0.40 a month to keep it there in Glacier Deep Archive. i plan to repeat the exercise every 2 or 3 years, building up a set of zip files. At that price i can treat it like a 'fire and forget' dustbin of stuff that I'll probably never have to access...

I've been trying a different way of recording for several years now. Have no way of knowing whether it will be better or worse than photos, but ... Honestly don't care because it is fun for me.

When some interesting thing happens with the kids, I shoot an email to their accounts in which I write the conversation, the way I felt, how we admired what they did, what we learnt from them and such things.

I have a RAID5 over a set of 3 internal SATA drives, then an external enclosure with 5 drives (RAID5) for backup connected to the same machine via eSATA, where an rsync job kicks off every night to sync between primary/backup volumes. No off-site backup, though, which I know is a single point of failure which I hope to remedy at some point.

E-Books:I use zotero to store all my books and notes. Using webdav to back up data to nas.

Photos: I will manually copy the photos from the drone and DSLR to the nas and format the TF card after copying.

Phone photos: I use the software provided by my nas service provider to back up my photos

Web pages: I run my own docker version hamsterbase on nas. Store all the pages I am interested in.

Printing photos is the best way, I think (if stored in a dark place).

There are also M-DISC disks and drives (archival quality BluRay with some specialized layers chemistry). Since they are positioned for long-term archival, I expect there will be some need to read them in the future, so some sort of drives will remain available.

I've installed iCloud on my Windows box, with iCloud photos enabled. Then I right-click the iCloud Photos folder and select "Always keep on device." It takes a bit but everything gets downloaded. I then have a script that makes a zip of all photos monthly with a timestamp for the title.

Cold storage may not be a great idea. With warm storage, you can run frequent checks like scrubs. Storing data with two cloud providers is a good option.

But Online storage must be encrypted. So the question is, what backup or encryption software do you use to be able to decrypt the data in 10—15 years or so?

Ardrive is interesting in this space: distributed storage with the promise of one-time payment sufficient to cover storage cost permanently. Every other solution I’ve seen requires ongoing rent, or ongoing stakeholder interest+capability for preservation without financial incentive

I was sad to learn that many of my IG stories (and presumably applies to reels too) have broken music links (even though the item is still in the library) . That means I cannot rely on IG to adequately safeguard my memories.

1. I've converted any old media format to digital

2. I back up locally to a drive inside a firebox (w/ built-in usb connector)

3. Backup offsite encrypted to Backblaze b2

3-2-1 backups haven't let the world down.

resilio sync (aka BTSync) on my iPhone to send all pictures to a dedicated server in the cloud, where I store a copy of all my stuff.

Format: a simple folder tree /Pictures/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD-Album-name

Locally.