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Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

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21–30 of 73 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#21
post #10

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…

Yeah and I think people overestimate how much interest their kids will have in old photos of their ancestors. 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 realiz…

Pro tip to parents out there:

Your kids will want to see other people in those childhood photos, more than they'll want to see 100,000 photos of their own faces. You, when you were younger; their now-gone grandparents; that friend they had for two grades before one of them moved ("OMG I totally forgot about them!"), that kind of thing. You'll get way more than enough photos of your kids, so far as your kids themselves are concerned, without even trying—it's the others you may neglect.

Now, for your own purposes, yeah, you probably want the photos of your kids more than anyone else who might get in the shots—but try to think of them and snap one or two of other people in the room, when you're taking e.g. birthday photos, or pan around from time to time when shooting videos of them. They'll eventually get more enjoyment out of the stuff, if you do.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#22

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 an…

> 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.

Honestly, I would really enjoy sifting through 5,000 photos from my grandparents or parents. (Sometimes the best photos are the embarrassing or private photos, like the time my dad asked me to help back up photos and I saw my mother trying to recreate a famous album cover.)

I appreciate the curation too.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#26
post #23

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

Local, as in your own home? What happens when the home burns down and you aren’t there to grad the backups?

I call my buddy who lives 20 minutes away and tell him I need my backup drive back that I keep in his safe and swap every few months.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#27
post #6

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.

But, are all those computers in the same location? Just one fire away from losing everything? I have all my photos and videos on local storage, but it is all mirrored to a secure cloud storage service that costs hardly anything. I’ve pulled the backups from that cloud service (you can’t access the files directly) to make sure it works properly.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#28
post #23

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

Same local NAS, where backup = encrypted in the cloud, and also on M-Disc blu-rays kept in my office (where I also keep two BD units which I test like once a year). But I love the other idea of printing the best out, I'll get to that for sure.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#30
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.
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