IMO the concept of long-term bulk storage doesn't really make sense: Most of your stuff will be recycled by your grandkids.
While you're alive, you can just buy a couple of NAS, stash one at a friend's/parent's place, buy the cheapest $/TB storage, use raidz to automatically correct errors over time, and set it up to email you every time it had to resiver to a hot spare so you can buy another HDD
>only a fool would trust them to last
Heh, head over to /r/DataHoarder to see more of that. "but this time it's different, my coasters don't use organic dyes!"
And you need to keep the bits on current technology. That is the real gambit.
So your NAS idea is probably the best with the caveat at your need to upgrade it regularly as well.
Compare it to a floppy disc from your grandparents. Not that bad for 3,5"? How about 5,25"? No? Then 8". These are now hard to come by. And this is just in the time span of 30-50 years.
The best bulk storage format was actually available early on and very shelf stable if treated reasonably: Paper tape. Low density and readers are hard to come by today.
Your primary point that our grandkids won't care is on point. We would drown if we keep everything.
But the counter point would be that if we do not even try to preserve anything we would probably end up with nothing.
But for every average Joe who does not care we seem to have plenty data hoarders to make up for that.
I disagree a bit. Some things might require long-term data storage. For example, GPG keys, personal wallets, private documents and certificates.
Imagine how much of your life can be wiped out by a Carrington Event, which is not that unlikely.
I don't trust clouds for this. Right now, archival-grade DVDs are not a bad option. Almost 5 GB, and under good storage conditions these can last >50 years, probably more.
Have you considered 100GB BD-RE? These are rewritable, but that is only the byproduct of being a phase-change medium, which is also >50 years and thus has a longer shelf life than the standard WORM BD/DVD.
I am using them and can say only good things so far.
This is true, but depending on what the data is, hopefully that stuff could be donated to a library if the stuff lasted long enough to go into the public domain. Of course, if it's family videos, no one's going to care about that crap, but if it's pirated movies or whatever, some of that stuff might not be available otherwise. Just look at all the classic games from the 70s-80s that would be gone forever if people hadn't copied and distributed them.
Based on the whole recent VCF ordeal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150 , donating any of this crap to a library or anyone else and it actually being used is a pipe dream. These organizations don’t have the time or space to process anything, assuming they don’t have it anyway.
Likely only the now deceased owner knew that they had xyz special material. Their kin processing their attic or garage likely don’t.
Why would people not care about family photos? All the stuff in the background is super useful for historians.
Keep in mind: old data is tiny by contemporary standards. So your grandchildren can just take the few TiB in your personal collection, and stick it on a futuristic thumb-drive somewhere. Barely takes up any space.
>Why would people not care about family photos? All the stuff in the background is super useful for historians.
That's a good point actually. Most people aren't going to care at all, but historians might, plus also movie-makers: it would be really useful to them to see real photos and footage from the far past.
Even just from one or a few decades ago is super useful.
Note also how typically the ads are the most fascinating parts of old media, be that newspapers or even TV recordings. All while contemporary arts are universally seen as annoying.
>Note also how typically the ads are the most fascinating parts of old media, be that newspapers or even TV recordings. All while contemporary arts are universally seen as annoying.
Ads are all annoying, contemporary or not. The old ones are only interesting because they're novel, and you're not watching them every day. You can see the same thing by traveling (or better yet, moving) to a foreign country and watching the TV ads there: they'll be interesting or entertaining for a few minutes, but will quickly become annoying after the novelty wears off.
Ads in old Computer Shopper magazines are interesting to people here because they're interested in computers and computer history, but they're not interesting to other people. But again, after you've looked through an old magazine full of these things, you'll tire of them.
As for ads being more interesting than "old media", that depends on the media. If it's classic old movies like Hitchcock thrillers or whatever, then definitely not. Movies like that are interesting and entertaining to watch even today. No one in their right mind wants to watch 2 hours of nonstop TV ads from the 1950s, by comparison.
Other stuff, it really depends on your interest, and how useful the information is to you now. Are you just satisfying curiosity about history? Or trying to solve some kind of problem that requires historical knowledge? Whatever you're researching is probably more interesting than the ads, though those might be interesting on their own too, to an extent.
I found those things quite fascinating, and if it's as small as a few hard-drives (and not something as big as eg a car), I would definitely keep it around.
- Most people are not as interesting as they think they are
- It's unlikely that your grandkids would have the same interests as you
- If anything in your NAS was relevant to the family, your SO would have kept a copy of it in her icloud instead of using your self-hosted photo viewer over tailscale
- Once you're old you almost certainly won't be using modern software and file formats. Accessing your data will be incredibly inconvenient
>Once you're old you almost certainly won't be using modern software and file formats. Accessing your data will be incredibly inconvenient
This isn't true. Sure, no one uses WMV or ZOO these days, but you can still get tools to read them. But those were also not-so-popular formats/codecs that were replaced quickly by better stuff. MP3 is also old, but still very ubiquitous. Furthermore, the specs and software for modern file formats (like audio/video codecs) are all publicly available. People will still be able to read h.264 videos 50 years from now, don't worry.
> - Most people are not as interesting as they think they are
> - It's unlikely that your grandkids would have the same interests as you
The bar is pretty low: your grandkids only need to be interested enough to keep some tiny amounts of data around. (Assuming that data capacities keep growing, your perhaps dozen of TiB of data will fit on a thumb drive in the future, or perhaps even an email attachment.)
Also your descendants don't need to find your data interesting for the same reasons you do. You might snap some pictures of your travels to famous landmarks (which your grand kids don't care about, because they can't find much better photos of the Eiffel Tower online), but they might be interested in how fashion changed over time, or weight or smartphones or whatever is in the background.
It's very, very hard to preserve only exactly what you do, and nothing else. There's always context, and people might be interested in the context, even if they ain't interested in you.
Btw, there's lots of diaries and autobiographies published. Some of them quite popular.
While you're alive, you can just buy a couple of NAS, stash one at a friend's/parent's place, buy the cheapest $/TB storage, use raidz to automatically correct errors over time, and set it up to email you every time it had to resiver to a hot spare so you can buy another HDD
>only a fool would trust them to last
Heh, head over to /r/DataHoarder to see more of that. "but this time it's different, my coasters don't use organic dyes!"