Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 141 posts

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

#61

I'm a bit shocked that all answers so far use cloud storage and not a single one proposes offline. I store everything in the cloud, because it is unbeatably convenient except for the very things mentioned: health, financial and legal. I'm not 100% strict either, because if a document has been sent or received electronically or can be assumed to be stored in the cloud anyways I really can't do much. I still assume tha…

> I'm a bit shocked that all answers so far use cloud storage and not a single one proposes offline.

Huh? I think I made the second or third comment in this thread outlining my solution which is offline-first:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37520972

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

#62

Apple solves this problem well! Note that I use iCloud family which allows me to share the storage with my family. But for going down the list: A) Mint for most financials. iCloud for storage of documents. B) Apple Health for keeping track of my records. For ad-hoc stuff I use iCloud to store the documents. C) Product and service info I use iCloud for. Logins and credentials to them are stored in my family's 1Passwor…

What do you do for recoverable backups? I also use iCloud for everything important but haven't figured out a good, automated system for full backups.

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

#63

In Belgium, every citizen has access to a "digital vault" provided by the government, which is accessible using their ID card. Individuals can upload up to 1GB of documents into this vault. It's a well-designed system that ensures privacy during one's lifetime, but you can choose what happens with it after your passing. https://www.izimi.be/en/

> It's a well-designed system that ensures privacy during one's lifetime

So is a filing cabinet or safe, ideas that have worked well for 1000s of years. If you really need a digital backup, throw the documents on a $10 flash drive, maybe have two copies of that.

I guess I'm cynical because governments and institutions get hacked all the time.

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

#64
This is a fascinating topic that doesn't get the attention it deserves.

The idea of trusting a single entity (the family computer expert, a single company, or a government agency) to be the sole host or custodian of important records and family photos/videos is fraught with risk: Even if that entity has redundancy across multiple geographic locations, they can have security breaches, their software can fail, their business can fail, or they can otherwise become incapacitated.

Security breach risk can be drastically reduced by encrypting your files before you even store them in that entity's system(s). But you'll need to protect that key and keep it in multiple locations that multiple people have access to. And it's going to make certain functions (like search indexing or file format conversions, to battle file format obsolescence) a lot more complicated.

Data loss risk due to failing hardware, software, companies, or people, can be greatly reduced by copying your stuff to multiple storage providers who ultimately rely on physically different data centers (e.g. if company A and B both ultimately use S3, Amazon is now my single point of failure), and taking an "append-only" approach.

But who is going to spend the time to pre-encrypt and sync all of your family's records like that? Possibly the family computer expert, who you can't depend on long-term.

If you're lucky, you have one who will do all of that for now, and maybe give everybody in the family a copy on a durable USB drive or similar* every few years. Or maybe you can pay someone to do the same. I'd pay for it, because it's a lot of work I don't want to do.

* For longer-term archival storage that should last several decades without power, M-Disc (DVDs or Blu-ray discs) used to be a go-to option. But that depends on people having access to a Blu-ray player decades from now, which I suspect will be a lot like the process of getting access to a floppy drive today.

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

#65

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 prod…

I too am in need of something that will let me archive photos without requiring a local copy. I don't understand why that's not easier to find. What do professionals do when they have terabytes of photo or video data, separate it out into disks and backup each individual disk as its own entity?

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

#66

Apple solves this problem well! Note that I use iCloud family which allows me to share the storage with my family. But for going down the list: A) Mint for most financials. iCloud for storage of documents. B) Apple Health for keeping track of my records. For ad-hoc stuff I use iCloud to store the documents. C) Product and service info I use iCloud for. Logins and credentials to them are stored in my family's 1Passwor…

do you use syncing? because if so, then i thought this wasn't a good backup strategy?

for example, my photos could get deleted on my iphone accidentally and that change would sync with all my other devices and that data would be lost forever.

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

#67
My approach is to look at contents as data-first with tools on the top. A few simple patterns of file systems manage this. Right now, I use Dropbox[1] as a primary container, with a family’s Google Workspace[2] account to augment when it needs spreadsheets, documents, forms, etc. I use Insync[3] to convert and back up a copy in open formats for all documents from Google Workspace.

I have been doing this for quite a while for our family, but I have extended slowly to immediate relatives while we helped them out with technology-related tasks. I haven’t reached the stage of complexities with the files and folder hierarchy that might break cloud providers[4].

Our family has a complete offline copy of everything, including backups of the photos, videos, and others. Everything is still in the works, and I recently started digitizing some old pictures from the in-laws. I stumbled upon some of their photos from around India’s independence and played with the colorization and animation thingy (that popped up a few months back). It became a craze, and their super large family gathered for a presentation, making many elders cry with tears of joy and disbelief.

My most significant achievements, compliments, and moments of pride have been that almost all of the new generations in the family choose to study computer engineering or computer-related. And so far, the best one is the niece commenting, “When I grow up, I want to marry a boy who is as technical as aunty’s husband.”

I have copies of the commercial ones (companies set up, wound down) since their inception. I also try to stick to plain-text, and as open formats as possible.

1. https://www.dropbox.com/

2. https://workspace.google.com

3. https://www.insynchq.com

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37507148

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

#68
post #33

I've been doing the data storage tango for thirty years now, and the one constant is that everything requires maintenance or has to be moved to a different platform and software eventually. Today, everything is in Google Drive and Google Photos; about 600 GB worth of data and media. Maintenance consists of an annual Takeout ordeal with copies going on two different removable drives, one of which is stored in a so-cal…

Where do you guys live to need to store birth certificate in a fireproof bag? I can just login into my government website with a digital identity provider and print one legally valid copy any time. Same for any identity related certificate.

United States probably.

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

#69
post #44
post #18

I have a messy drawer where I dump all of this stuff. It’s basically write-only, once I throw something in there I know I’ll never look for it again. For digital stuff it’s mostly the same idea. If it’s email (which is almost always the case), I archive and forget about it. If it’s something else, I’ll throw it in my virtual “messy drawer” which is just a folder in Google Drive. You are getting quite a few clever ide…

I used to do a box like this. The "temporal ordering" helped narrow search. But I found that finding things in it was still so difficult, that it wasn't worthwhile every time it'd be useful. There was also trying to find one document, and having to do a second thorough pass when I didn't find it in the first pass, which could take over an hour of misery. Today, I routinely download and save PDF/OFX/QFX for every fina…

>set up a scanning appliance/station that takes only seconds to use

Fujitsu ScanSnap is a highly recommended product. I have one on my desk that I bought over ten years ago -- it's slightly larger than a box of facial tissues (kleenex), all I have to do to scan is open the two "flaps", insert document, press a button, then assign a file name and folder (easy once a history list is established). Scans color or B&W, single side or duplex.

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

#70
post #33

I've been doing the data storage tango for thirty years now, and the one constant is that everything requires maintenance or has to be moved to a different platform and software eventually. Today, everything is in Google Drive and Google Photos; about 600 GB worth of data and media. Maintenance consists of an annual Takeout ordeal with copies going on two different removable drives, one of which is stored in a so-cal…

Where do you guys live to need to store birth certificate in a fireproof bag? I can just login into my government website with a digital identity provider and print one legally valid copy any time. Same for any identity related certificate.

Do you store your login to the website in a fireproof bag?
Post reply on HN