Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?

Same here, paperless changed my life. At my previous place I was also using one of the services where you get assigned an address with a fake unit number and they receive/scan/email all your post. The current country has much less paper mail, so I stopped, but would recommend that approach in general.

I'm also mirroring the family Google photos locally and backing it all up to rsync.net.

Regarding retention - everything gets kept, I don't care about retention rules. Things are tagged so a payslip from 2001 is still there if I ever need it, but I won't see it otherwise. It would cost more to think about it that the few hundred MB that it costs in storage space.

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Interesting. TIL

Fortunately for me, most of the official documents here are digitized, and stored on government servers, so in the event of my death, my family can request access to relevant documents. That takes care of most of the official stuff. Also, everything legal i cosigned by my wife, so either one of us has equal access to it, but like official documents, these documents are also stored in government databases.

As for products, i have aimed to buy services that are easily transferrable, i.e. we use iCloud family sharing, meaning every user has their own storage, but they piggy back on my paid subscription. If/when i stop paying, they can chose to continue paying by themselves, and things will just "magically" keep working, but otherwise it's a tricky game.

As for memories, i store everything in the cloud. Most is encrypted by Cryptomator. I have a small server at home synchronizing data home in real time, and the server backs up data hourly to a local target, and a couple of times per day to another cloud.

I have thought long and hard about decentralizing this to let each users laptop do this, but with a family photo album of 3.5TB that would mean i lose deduplication.

It would also put much more demand on the client hardware, as it would need to be able to hold the entire photo library to back it up. I have LONG REQUESTED a way to backup iCloud data without the need to keep it all local, i.e. download upon use for backup, and delete again, but sadly that's not how it works. If your data is "cloud only", your backup will only backup file pointers, and not the actual photos.

Once every year i make Blu-Ray M-disc archives of the previous years photos, and to some lesser extent also documents. I make identical copies and store them in geographically separate locations. I use no encryption or compression on these archive discs. I also have a set of identical external USB drives that i update with the entire archive yearly and then rotate between locations.

I am fully aware that optical media may not be around for much longer, but that's a problem for future me. For now it is the best and most affordable "long term, no maintenance" storage technology available to consumers. Until an official "end of life" is reported, i will keep using it. Once it's EOL i can easily migrate my archive to "something more better", even if that ends up being just ordering photo copies.

In Denmark we have e-boks and mit.dk which offer much the same service.

On top of that, every official document, from birth certifica, loans, drivers license, health insurance, and everything else is stored in government databases and can usually be accessed from there, provided your national single sign-on solution, MitID, works.