OneDrive and a fire resistant box. I suppose I actually store far more in my emails than I should!
If you're willing to share: "more than you should" in the sense that it could fall in the hands of identity thieves? or some other reason?
Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
101–110 of 141 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
#102Apple solves this problem for me entirely. No need to tag documents etc, just iCloud everything -> everything is searchable.
if you're willing to share: does this mean you trust apple or that other options are just worse?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
#103I separate my data into two categories, fast (and small) and slow (but big). Both types are important, but separation makes management much easier. Fast data: - documents, pdfs, config files, notes txt etc. - these files are synced directly, on-site and off-site Slow data: - archives, images, music, large backups etc. - these files are transfered to off-site archive on a per-need basis - they are made available in th…
if you're willing share: very roughly, how long did it take to setup and how long does it take to run incrementally?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
#104I live in a paperful country, and I have no scanner. Important stuff has a photo taken, and it's likely backed up in my photo archives (Syncthing → Pi Storage → NAS backup). My girlfriend still uses google and whatsapp, and I tend to send her important media in our chats, so we'd both have to be kicked out of our gmail and whatsapp accounts to truly lose everything there.
I did something like this for a long time.
One of the tools I found useful is Microsoft Lens mobile app: it's almost as quick as taking a picture of a doc, but it makes it easy to create a pdf of all the docs and bundle up multiple pages.
Over the years, I have lost access of important google accounts. In one occasion, I had a very old google voice number which I used from time to time. At an unexpected time, Google sent me an email asking me to validate that I still needed it within 30 days. At the time, I was traveling and unable to check email for complicated reasons. I ended up losing the Google voice number, which was the 2FA for a number of accounts, which then became irrevocably lost since the number was re-assigned.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
#105A folder on my desktop named “stuff”. On a more serious note I use MS OneDrive family account and iCloud - I figure if either of those companies goes under there are bigger things to worry about. I print a lot of my photos so I’ve always got hard copies of the kids when they were growing up - everything else is unimportant or replaceable.
I've gotten as far as buying the photo printer but picking out what to print out of the flood of photos - and then where to keep the paper - has kept me from actually printing :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
#106Fortunately 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 prod…
one approach might be to use multiple icloud accounts to shard the photos data by what you want to sync locally vs not (for example by set of years, i.e., myname1980to1990, myname1991to2000, etc). it's an added pain no doubt.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
#107We scan every document and put it in a folder synced with SyncThing. We throw the original away unless it is something official like a birth certificate. We use SyncThing because it is free, doesn't require user accounts, and works across Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS (Möbius) and Android. We have a bunch of high level folders (eg. Health, School, etc). Inside that folder every document is named starting with a date, eg:…
thanks for pointing to SyncThing - I'll check it out.
if you're willing to share:
1. what scanner do you use?
2. what do you do for documents that might be in two places? ex: car insurance, health insurance - in the insurance folder or the health folder? ex: medications that both spouses take, in his folder or her folder or in a "both" folder?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
#108I use https://www.trustworthy.com/ and Dropbox and am very happy with this combination.
+1 for Trustworthy, it’s a really fantastic product. The app is well designed, constantly improving and the founders really seem to understand the problem they are solving.
thanks for sharing Trustworthy - I'll check it out.
if you're willing to share: do you worry about their security or do you feel that they're at least as secure as what you could do yourself or other services might do?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
#109A few folks have talked about digitizing paper documents, so one of my favorite tricks for iPhone havers: iPhones have very nice scanning tools built in, but it’s buried in the Notes app. Create a new note, click the camera icon, then “scan documents” and it will create a very nice, usually well cropped and OCRd scan that’s saved as a PDF you can then export elsewhere. Wish it was a standalone app because it works so…
Long press the notes app icon, and you’ll get a shortcut to scan documents
If you want a standalone app, Microsoft Lens is actually pretty good for creating pdfs from pictures.
I agree it's great to be able to do this natively on iphone without third-party apps.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
#110A few folks have talked about digitizing paper documents, so one of my favorite tricks for iPhone havers: iPhones have very nice scanning tools built in, but it’s buried in the Notes app. Create a new note, click the camera icon, then “scan documents” and it will create a very nice, usually well cropped and OCRd scan that’s saved as a PDF you can then export elsewhere. Wish it was a standalone app because it works so…
thanks for sharing - it's a great feature.
one problem I've found with notes is that they don't appear to have any kind of export mechanism - i.e., you're tied to apple and that app. Is that right?