I have been wondering on how I could preserve some of my digital photos so my son could access them when I am long gone. I currently have a mix of iCloud and OneDrive but those requires account logins and I couldn't find a convenient way of like hey son here is all your baby pictures and all of our adventure when we where still living together. Any suggestions?
Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#2I 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#3E-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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#4NAS 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?)
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#53-2-1 backups haven't let the world down.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#6Keep 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#7I 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#8By 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#9I 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#10I 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.