The easiest by far solution is to simply copy them forward to new media once every year. Have an offsite copy.
I don't trust any cloud backup. They can go dark at any time for any reason, you can lose your password, you can get "canceled", a hacker can ransomware it, etc.
I periodically check that ransomware hasn't infected my backups by seeing if an unrelated device, like a media server box, can read the files on it.
I have no faith in "archival quality" media, as if you can't find a device to read it, it's worthless. Have you noticed that computers increasingly don't come with CD drives anymore? Why would anyone want them, since a 64Gb USB stick goes for $6? Soon there will be no way to read those "archival quality" CDs.
I threw away my old punch cards, paper tape, magtape, DECtape, etc., as it wasn't worth the effort to find a machine that could read them.
For example, in the 80s I'd use various compression programs. When I eventually archived them, I uncompressed them with the old compression programs.
I store pdfs with a .txt version of their contents, too.
3.5 inch USB floppy drives are still routine. 5.25 inch, try the used market. Who knows what happens in 10 years?
That's for recovery. I wouldn't use floppies as a primary medium these days. CD/DVD might be on OK choice.
CDs only hold 800Mb of information. When you can get a 64G usb stick for $6, who is going to burn CDs anymore?
Re USB:
What's the life expectancy of a USB stick? I've had friends get unpleasant surprises when USB sticks were unreadable after a few years.
Are some brands better than others? High capacity vs. low capacity.
I don't expect my children to be able to explore my digital archives when I'm dead in 50 years or so, so anything I want to be found then I print or otherwise place on a physical medium that's readable without computers. The less important stuff can stay archived on hard disks as plain files on a FAT32 filesystem. With a physical label on the disk describing the contents.
I cleaned out boxes of photos from my late parents house. Lots of pics from my childhood years, somewhat sparser selection of older photos. Never look at any of them. I have a framed photo of my parents on a shelf; that's enough.
I also basically stopped taking photos of stuff about 15 years ago when I realized I never go back and look at them again.
Bottom line, I don't have much digital content to archive, and I plan to keep it that way.
Your kids will want to see other people in those childhood photos, more than they'll want to see 100,000 photos of their own faces. You, when you were younger; their now-gone grandparents; that friend they had for two grades before one of them moved ("OMG I totally forgot about them!"), that kind of thing. You'll get way more than enough photos of your kids, so far as your kids themselves are concerned, without even trying—it's the others you may neglect.
Now, for your own purposes, yeah, you probably want the photos of your kids more than anyone else who might get in the shots—but try to think of them and snap one or two of other people in the room, when you're taking e.g. birthday photos, or pan around from time to time when shooting videos of them. They'll eventually get more enjoyment out of the stuff, if you do.
source: me looking at family videos from the 90s
I actually try to take what others might consider 'bad' pictures. Someone mowing the lawn, cleaning the cabinets, sweeping the floor, parking at the grocery store, working on some hobby or another, etc. These kind of pictures show "what were we actually up to in those days".
The key is in the curation though, it is unlikely that your child will want to sort through thousands of blurry, duplicate, or unrelated photos. 100 really good and special photos/videos are better than a mixed up mass of 5,000.
If you are concerned with passing away before your son is of age, just make sure there are multiple backups, and the sign in information for anything that isn't local is communicated to his guardian.
Honestly, I would really enjoy sifting through 5,000 photos from my grandparents or parents. (Sometimes the best photos are the embarrassing or private photos, like the time my dad asked me to help back up photos and I saw my mother trying to recreate a famous album cover.)
I appreciate the curation too.
Which is...?
I’ve also heard good things about Backblaze.
I’ve also heard good things about Backblaze.
My advice would be to cut selected items to an SSD on a routine basis and either stash it in the family safe or wherever you keep important files. Use an existing filesystem, not whatever the latest newfangled vendor specific one, and use a fairly well documented format for images. Store documents as text or rtf.
Anyway as you say, worth doing your own research.
Now that is a great idea! I do something similar to you with the exception of using faraday bags. Thanks for sharing!
But, for financial/estate data that my heirs might eventually needed, I have a script that `rsync`s select data to (multiple copies of) an unencrypted external USB drive, in FAT32 format.
Included on the drives, and also stored printed with them, is a one-page `READ-THIS-FIRST.txt` file that says what info is on the drive, as well as top-level summary about other things they might need to know (like what insurances I have, any will, and how to access the GnuCash files).
There's also a PDF&paper one-pager assets&liabilities report from GnuCash, for use before anyone gets around to installing GnuCash. This enumerates all the accounts where money is stored or owed, and sets expectations for the reader's very-very tiny inheritance.
There's also passwords. Mine are currently handwritten in a redundant pair of Rite In The Rain paper notebooks, one off-site. But you could also use a password manager service, and some services can release more passwords to family members upon your expiration. Your survivors being able to just one of those accounts, might save them a lot of headache, and you don't know which one that will be.
Even for only family photos that they can already access, you even might want to have a one-pager bus-factor document that includes things like how to keep the photos from disappearing (such as by not getting locked out of access, not failing to pay a cloud service bill, or not donating the old junk servers that were storing them). If this one-pager is accessible to kids, maybe structure it as notes for yourself of how things are set up, like an engineering nerd, without alluding too much that they'll someday need to do it.
Homelab runs photoprism (open source google photos alternative), plex, code-server, etc.
My current setup is Ryzen on an AsRock motherboard (let's me use Unbuffered ECC RAM), and you use LSI HBA cards (see art of server on EBAY) which gives you more SATA ports.
Still in the range of $500-$1000 (no HDD) depending on how you spec it out, but far more powerful and expandable for anything even close to that price range.
If you are going for something in the $200-300 range, you can likely take the same path, but will make compromises in e.g. motherboard choice that won't scale well over time (but can still do a basic 32TB file server with ease).
I was considering AsRock x300 mini desktop, but it supports only 2.5” HDDs. I am looking for two 3.5” HDDs, one NVMe and ECC RAM, low power CPU, around $600 or so.
You will need a dedicated graphics card, thankfully they are going down in price, if you are going to run Plex/any kind of transcoding, I recommend looking up "NVENC Encoder Matrix" and finding a card that support h265 and B-Frames (Turing or later).
Biggest cost is easily the CPU, a 5600x will run you $190. You could try a 3600 for $150 but I have not tested that with the ECC RAM, which is completely undocumented what kind of support is there it seems.
You probably want the 5600x anyways, I was able to overclock the ECC RAM up to 3866MHz and set my infinity fabric FCLK to 1933MHz (the 3600 can't reach that really at all). It's only like 5% more performance though.
Might need to look at used parts (Mobo, CPU, GPU) to get it for $600, but I haven't looked up prices and tallied it up.
[0]: https://icedrive.net
We can iterate from there. Wouldnt it be sweet to be able to let other people dump more credit into your provider wallet, so it could keep going? Maybe we could standardize a "end of service" webhook/notification, and your website & content could jump ship & re-instamce itself on another provider automatically if your current one declares it's going under.
Dont forget to setup after-life DNS too!
Then I have two 5TB LaCie Rugged drives that I just attach to the Mac. Finally, using ChronoSync to schedule copying contents from the Mac to both drives as mirrors.
However, for the digital content I have published, such as our podcast, I plan to form and fund some sort of trust that will be tasked with keeping it online and publicly available for as long as possible. This may just mean making sure it is archived in at least one library, the Internet Archive, etc.
When some interesting thing happens with the kids, I shoot an email to their accounts in which I write the conversation, the way I felt, how we admired what they did, what we learnt from them and such things.
Photos: I will manually copy the photos from the drone and DSLR to the nas and format the TF card after copying.
Phone photos: I use the software provided by my nas service provider to back up my photos
Web pages: I run my own docker version hamsterbase on nas. Store all the pages I am interested in.
There are also M-DISC disks and drives (archival quality BluRay with some specialized layers chemistry). Since they are positioned for long-term archival, I expect there will be some need to read them in the future, so some sort of drives will remain available.
But Online storage must be encrypted. So the question is, what backup or encryption software do you use to be able to decrypt the data in 10—15 years or so?
2. I back up locally to a drive inside a firebox (w/ built-in usb connector)
3. Backup offsite encrypted to Backblaze b2
Format: a simple folder tree /Pictures/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD-Album-name