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Comment by vulcan1964 | Hacker News Reader

vulcan1964

What will happen to the heaps of digital junk stored on flash drives, hard drives, forgotten online accounts? I get overwhelmed thinking about organizing my own electronics files… wonder what my kids will do with it all.

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“Oh. This one is encrypted too. I wonder what mum and dad kept on those… Ah well.”

I mean, with digital stuff all the things that may be worthwhile to pass on can be passed on easily way in advance because you don't have to get rid of anything to do so. Online accounts and such will just be forgotten excepting the ones they need to access to finish your affairs (like banking).

> wonder what my kids will do with it all.

The good part about digital content is that you don't have to do absolutely anything with it.

Keep documents and photos accessible, forget the rest.

As we approach multi-generational widespread digital content "cloud" services, we'll see more and more companies allowing content to be easily passed over to the next generation — but just for reference.

I don't need my father’s iCloud photos, but it'd be nice to take a scroll in 20 years.

The cloud services of big tech cos can be counted on to store things cheaply or for free long term, for now. I do not trust them to hold onto anything or preserve access to it for 50 or 100 years. IMHO, people should be their own digital archivists for the really important stuff on those timescales, to avoid the risk of important data being discarded or held hostage by profit motivated companies at some point down the line we can't see coming yet. "The cloud" is young in terms of human life, and the rules we live by are volatile on that scale, shifting with transfers of power and depletion (or discovery) of important resources.

You won't need grandma's YouTube either, but one of these days the videos from your ancestors' early lives will still be there in the hundreds of hours of high quality full colour. The idea that old people's lives were small black and white portraits once or twice per decade and that the past is a long way away, will totally collapse in the next 25-100 years. I keep wondering if that's going to be a big change to society or not.

I try to remind myself to print albums on a regular basis as I am pretty sure my daughters will be as happy as I am to go through old photos albums as the digital stuff will probably be hard to manage.

I've gone through things like digital photo collections with mine and sent whatever they wanted (mostly pictures from their childhoods etc). They seem to prefer storing it all in their phones (w. cloud backup), but I have it all available through a NAS if they ever want it. I suspect that when the missus and I are gone, the physical digital stuff like drives and computers will simply be sent to recycling.

They will do what NASA did: forget how to read all the old tapes.

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