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Comment by plater | Hacker News Reader

What many people forget with these x$/month is that you will have to pay this for the rest of your life. That's why I have chosen an option where you pay a higher fee once (about 3 years cost) and then it does not cost anything going forward.

Another issue with storing all these photos for your whole life is of course that once you die, what happens? Who will take charge of all these photos? Who will continue to pay? Who will clean up and take ownership of it? Or will they just be lost once you are dead and all this money for what?

The third issue is of course that the more random unsorted pictures we have the less we want to look at it because 90% are bad and only 10% are good. It's important to clean up just after taking the photos.

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Head too far down this path of thought and you hit an existential crisis pretty quick though: "why are you storing photos?" "who will look at them?" "will anyone be looking at them in 200 years? 100? 50? 10?"

On a long enough timescale we all die and are probably forgotten. I've actually spent a decent amount of time resisting the urge to just delete all my old photos (I have things going back to early high school - taken on a Sony Mavica that used floppy disks).

There's a very liberating feeling to the idea of just having no history at all - probably similar to the appeal of the idea of having all your works crumble to dust when you die, which is also something I've seen people refer to at different times.

But, since I haven't done that yet, and since managing an on-site server or disks is it's own stress (i.e. eventually my house will burn down or flood and I'll lose everything...so what was the point?), then paying that $x/month is basically the price I pay to defer having to really think about it.

Unless I am dead I feel pretty confident that I want to see my photos and videos of my kids growing up in 50 years time (it would make me 90)!

That's why I recommend physical prints. Hopefully you would put them somewhere where you actually look at them from time to time. Or put them in a safe deposit box (assuming you trust those).

The problem of "what to keep" isn't even digital-specific. In my youth I probably bought two dozen disposable cameras, had the pictures printed, even paid for the CD-ROMs when they became available. Where are those pictures now? Who knows! That's why I like Marie's message: it's not about throwing away junk, but keeping what you love close to you.

Regarding the cost. I still think it's a good option to use a cloud storage service or similar. But I just tried to say that it's way better to select something like pCloud's forever option, one time cost upfront, instead of paying every month or year for 50 years or more. After about 3.5 years, it's "free" storage after that.

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