Hacker News Reader

Comment by LASR | Hacker News Reader

About a month ago found a stack of MiniDV tapes from about 15 years ago.

It was my own home videos. I wanted to preserve them, so wanted to upload them to Google Photos.

It took me some looking around in eBay to find a camcorder to play these back. When it came home, I realized that I needed a FireWire 400 port to capture full resolution. So more digging around for a FireWire PCI-E card. I was finally able to transcode and upload some 15GB worth of video. It took 3 minutes on my gigabit internet for the upload. About a month for the whole process acquiring the hardware etc.

When I think about these tapes some 50 years from now, it might as well be completely unrecoverable, not because the tapes went bad, but because we have nothing to read them. Makes you wonder about galactic time scales like in Star Trek.

View on HN

That happens already; there were problems getting hold of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_P... data only 20-30 years after the missions

And in 2 years those tapes might be the only thing you got.

Could you elaborate?

Maybe that he uploaded them to an unpaid service which might make a policy shift to remove the data at some unknown time in the future?

https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/

> found a stack of MiniDV tapes from about 15 years ago ... I wanted to preserve them

Here's where I raise my hand and ask "Why?"

They've been sitting in a box for 15 years. You never watched them, you never even thought about them. Why preserve them?

It's why I stopped taking pictures and videos of things. I never watched them again. It's all just a lot of waste motion over some dream that someday we'll find value in sitting and looking at this old stuff again.

Some things only get interesting with time. How young we looked. How different the city looks now. Or people who disappeared.

For me it’s personal history. My kids LOVE watching videos of me and my wife when we were younger. Luckily for them, my wife’s family converted all their videos to digital and so it’s easy to watch.

I’m itching to do the same to my parents’ collection so my kids can see more.

I suspect their kids will enjoy the same.

Just because you don't doesn't mean other people don't. May as well condemn someone for following a sport you don't like.

Asking "why" doesn't imply condemnation, does it?

At HN we assume best intention, asking why is how we learn about other people and their reasoning.

Of course it may be different than ours. But isn't that how we learn and are exposed to new ideas?

IMHO we should encourage more respectful "why?" questions.

Reread the post, especially this sentence, and ask yourself if it was "respectful"

> It's all just a lot of waste motion over some dream that someday we'll find value in sitting and looking at this old stuff again.

Yes, but when you read it in context, it's clear that the author is referring to themself:

>It's why I stopped taking pictures and videos of things. I never watched them again. It's all just a lot of waste motion over some dream that someday we'll find value in sitting and looking at this old stuff again.

The author uses "I" over and over again, explaining that they don't see the point, so asking about a different perspective seems genuine to me, or at least there's a plausible interpretation that it is genuine.

From HN guidelines:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

It has nothing to do with intent. It’s tone deaf to ask why someone would want to preserve memories, especially if it’s based on your one anecdote of yourself not wanting them.

It’s like asking why someone would want to spread ashes or preserve an old piece of rickety furniture a long lost relative built.

For me the biggest thing was that the tapes had been sitting for 15 years, then discovered and treated as though they were something valuable. If they were so important, why were they forgotten on a shelf for 15 years?

Wait until you have to clean out a parent's house with a rooms full of stuff saved because they thought the grandkids might find it interesting. Here's the reality: they don't. My mother saved boxes and boxes and boxes of photos. None of them ever sorted, or put in albums. Just thrown in boxes. Saved for decades. Was it hard to throw them away? Yes, a little. There were a lot of moments of my childhood there. But if I asked myself honestly, was I going to do anything with them other than put them on a shelf at my house? The answer was no. I'd advise sparing your kids that burden.

A friend of my mother's had saved every canceled check she ever wrote. Boxes of them, because she thought her kids or grandkids might be interested in them some day. Their reaction was likely: What's a check?

If you really cherish something, and it regularly brings happiness to your life, by all means save it. But do it for yourself, not for what you think your descendants will find interesting. And if it's been in a closet for 5 years, ask yourself why you are keeping it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com