11–20 of 73 posts
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.
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.
[0]: https://icedrive.net
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 FAT…
I cleaned out boxes of photos from my late parents house. Lots of pics from my childhood years, somewhat sparser selection of older photos. Never look at any of them. I have a framed photo of my parents on a shelf; that's enough.
I also basically stopped taking photos of stuff about 15 years ago when I realized I never go back and look at them again.
Bottom line, I don't have much digital content to archive, and I plan to keep it that way.
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…
Format: a simple folder tree /Pictures/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD-Album-name
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.
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!