31–40 of 58 posts
My family has a couple of family cookbooks where we've done something similar.
I would search for services that are very likely a long time around. The first and almost only thing, that comes to mind is a AWS S3 bucket. I'm pretty sure, that S3 will be around the next decades. Nobody knows the future of Amazon, but we can assume that the data stored in S3 has enough value for enough people on this planet, that S3 will last a loooong time. I can't imagine 100 years, but if something from our tim…
If you pay $5/month for 1 year, your posts will be archived forever.
> If we can't charge your card, your site goes into read only mode. Even if something catastrophic happens, your content will remain online.
This is kind of similar to BitTorrent or Filecoin, but the problem with them is that they're tied to the distribution medium. What you'd really want is something that can change with the times and isn't tied to any single backend.
How to incentivize people to continue hosting the content is another problem, but I predict that it shouldn't be too hard because of the constant falling cost of storage.
An old YC blog platform Posthaven [0] does this. If you pay $5/month for 1 year, your posts will be archived forever. > If we can't charge your card, your site goes into read only mode. Even if something catastrophic happens, your content will remain online. [0] https://posthaven.com/pricing
The only correct answer to the question is (a) legal deposit with a national library (many take e-deposits these days, so you might not have to print it) or (b) print it on good paper or write it on a good cd and hope for the best
There is of course the silent other half of your question … does anyone really care about your accumulated life history that much ? sure your immediate family might, for a while, but one the bereavement period is over ?
For large volume data files (e.g. podcasts, videos, etc.) the internet archive works for me (https://archive.org/).
If the problem had been stated as "publish content that lives forever", then we would need to look at ideas with eternity as the purpose. archive.org, bitcoin embedding, at least semi-successful for-profit publication as a book, Long Now - that kind of thing.
But the poster asked for "my great grandchildren". In this case (1) this is short term, (2) this is aimed at an extremely specific set of target people, (3) there is already a structure in place: the family. It can be something as simple as "publish photos and writings as periodical PDFs and distribute and entrust to current family members." If there are not enough current family members for redundancy, then include some family friends. With a notice in each volume that you want these volumes to be communicated to your great grandchildren. Let each one worry about hosting or storage. If they loose theirs, they can easily rebuild their stash from the others. If none of them cares to, that's an answer too, but you can fix that by hiring and paying a trustee to maintain sets in 2-3 of the digital platforms mentioned elsewhere (perhaps including archive.org).
- no service is expected to last long enough or to keep your data safe,
- a physical medium is the way to go,
- create 3 backups stored in different location,
- use a different brand for each backup,
- every 10y review the backups: check the data degradation, rebackup on a new medium if the current one is getting phased away, reencode the content if the format is becoming obsolete & hard to open. [IMO, this is the key point]
Getting the old works of a predecessor on a physical medium is a really good feeling (I know how I felt when I'd discover the old notebooks from my father, uncle, etc.). Based on my experience and Internet, CD-R seems to be a good choice if the data volume allows. But it's getting slowly phased away. (fun fact: a few months ago I found the first CD I burnt -- works flawlessly (although, no checksums checked) after 25y)
For just hosting something as long as possible I would highlight two options stolen blatantly from previous threads: If you can throw enough money at the problem and are in the US, set up a trust to host your content for as long as the funds last. If not you could bet on The Internet Archive to outlive you (and maybe donate to them). But I think the bigger issue than hosting is discoverability. How will your great gr…