Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

71–73 of 73 posts

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 themselve…

Yep. I could take a million pictures per day of my cats because they're cute, but those aren't going to be interesting even to me in a couple of years.

I actually try to take what others might consider 'bad' pictures. Someone mowing the lawn, cleaning the cabinets, sweeping the floor, parking at the grocery store, working on some hobby or another, etc. These kind of pictures show "what were we actually up to in those days".

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

#72
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crashplan. I’ve also heard good things about Backblaze.

Thanks for sharing! I don't know why i thought crashplan went out of business (i guess i must be thinking of another provider). Now, looking at their pricing, its really great! Thanks again!

Well… they used to provide services for individuals, but then they decided to drop that and only support businesses. Since I was under a multi year contract, they moved me over to a small business account and they have let me stay there ever since.

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

#73
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume that outboard CD/DVD drives (USB, maybe others) will be available for a long time to come. 3.5 inch USB floppy drives are still routine. 5.25 inch, try the used market. Who knows what happens in 10 years? That's for recovery. I wouldn't use floppies as a primary medium these days. CD/DVD might be on OK choice.

5.25 drives were once so ubiquitous, I am astonished how difficult it is to read a floppy these days. First, you have to find a drive - ancient used ones only. Then, you have to find an interface to it, because nobody makes them for modern computers, and BIOS support has been dropped over a decade ago. CDs only hold 800Mb of information. When you can get a 64G usb stick for $6, who is going to burn CDs anymore?

At this point 5.25 reading is a data recovery task.

Re USB:

What's the life expectancy of a USB stick? I've had friends get unpleasant surprises when USB sticks were unreadable after a few years.

Are some brands better than others? High capacity vs. low capacity.

Post reply on HN