Your Personal Archiving Project: Where Do You Start?
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All of my computers and backups are encrypted. If I were to drop dead tomorrow or suffer some kind of memory loss, 99% of the documents and pictures I own will turn into meaningless blobs, assuming the cryptography in the products I use are any good. I have no intention to print out the keys and give them to someone while I'm still young and healthy. Part of the reason is that I believe those files should die with me. There's nothing incriminating, nor anything particularly embarrassing, it's just nobody else's effin' business. That's what privacy means to me.
And yet, it is the business of historians and librarians to poke into dead people's private documents and learn from them. In an ideal future society, maybe it will be historians, not spooks, who try to break commonly used encryption methods.
A generation ago, when someone died their next of kin were probably going to be reasonably comfortable donating the contents of their office to the local university — you could quickly scan to see if there was anything truly bizarre hidden in the closet, most people didn't take that many photographs (especially NSFW ones, what with meddling clerks) and you could quickly look over the ones they did have to make sure there wasn't anything you wanted, etc.
Now, though, almost everyone carries around high-quality cameras and generates gigabytes a year of geo-located pictures. Many casual conversations which would have been lost forever are now recorded. Some of it might be easy to exclude (“Scholars will just have to live without the Chief Justice's online dating history”) but it's hard to imagine being able to quickly go through a mixed service like Facebook or a cloud photo backup service without some potentially embarrassing oversights.
I'd bet the most likely outcome of this would be scholars having to wait for increasingly long embargo periods to expire to avoid the odds of data-mining or computer vision finding unwanted links to people who are still alive.
That's not to say that this didn't happen in the past – a good example was the time that Justice Thurgood Marshall donated his papers to the Library of Congress under terms allowing access after his death, leading to a minor firestorm when a clever Washington Post reporter used them for insights about other people who were still serving on the Supreme Court:
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/26/us/chief-justice-assails-l...
Suggestion: leave decryption instructions with (attorney, loved one, safe deposit box, etc.) so we don't miss your take on life. Someone (can't know who) may benefit and spend a moment thanking you.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
The Wikipedia page for secret sharing links to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine
Apparently the word has been use to refer to secret sharing. It hints at the problem with using this strategy to preserve access to encrypted data: all the sharing parties will die eventually.
* Readable 100 years from now. If that sounds crazy, consider whether your family currently has photos 75-100 years old? Ours does, and I don't think it's unusual. Come to think of it, possibly the factor that determines the age of a family's archive is how long they have had access to cameras.
* Maximum fidelity: Complete and correct, over time. This involves resolution, color gamut and some sort of color correction (I'm not quite sure; I'm no color expert), and error correction for the ravages of time.
* Metadata: Stored in the same file as the image (otherwise the relationship between image file and metadata file will almost certainly be lost in 100 years), readable 100 years from now (UTF-8 seems the obvious choice), machine-readable and parsable for building databases, user-defined fields, and editable (to add and update information after the image is created).
* End-user control of data: That online service you're using might not be around in 100 years, or even in 1.
Maybe I'm missing one or two specs here, but does anyone know the recommended solutions? What do professional archivists use?
This is good general advice for solving any problem, from archiving a lifetime of curios to building a complicated software project.
If you think about the work, you will always have work. If you think about the goal, you will reach the goal.
No, that's really the best thing. Don't keep a lot of crap. Even sentemental crap. It clutters your life, physically and psychologically.
although some things, especially technical knowledge, are great to archive/store for later retrieval. i just don't feel the same for personal things. i think it's healthy to forget, especially in the information age where being able to do so is practically a luxury.
It's often better to scan things like photos and documents and tag them; that way you don't have to decide ahead of time how you're going to search them.