Once a year I select about 100 of my favourite pictures from my phone and have them printed and bound to a book. I suspect this is likely to be the only way my descendants will be able to see them.
My experience is that when someone dies, all their paperwork gets left in a drawer for years until the next house move and then it's all thrown out.
The digital archive or cloud storage will likely in many cases not even be discovered. And if it is discovered, it will probably be such a load of images, good and bad, that no-one will have the time to really look it through and appreciate it.
But for sure, both options combined is probably best.
If I had a gigabytes of photos of my grandparents or great grandparents I would spend hours pouring over them looking at what their life was like before I knew them. That would be such a neat keepsake.
Given their is no real customer service team that handles their free tier accounts, I am personally reluctant to assume my Gdrive data will be salvageable.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en
(That's not to say there aren't other concerning reasons why that data may not be accessible.)
How do you do this?
My experience has been the opposite, with relatives eagerly snatching up the old photographs.
My boss is young and one of those people for whom digital is the only way. Then one day she got a box of old photographs and was absolutely amazed that she could turn them over and read where they were taken, on what occasion, and who was in the photos.
She now prints out all of her photos and writes notes on the back of them and keeps them in a box, just like people have done for the last century.
Exactly, and setting up a NAS has never been easier.
People use so many cloud services and having it all private and self-hosted is absolutely amazing. It’s really not that hard to set up either, and there’s little to maintenance outside replacing a failed drive.
That started me down the path to owning all my own media.
It also didn’t help that iCloud Photos is a privacy nightmare.
I trust any cloud provider a lot more than my lazy self.
> and external storage is becoming cheaper every year
Sure, but electricity isn't. At the current price in the UK it seems like running a small NAS would be 10 GBP per month, more than most online storage solutions.
That is without counting the initial investment of buying the NAS, the cost of maintaining it (if I have to spend an hour a month on maintenance, that's $1000+ a year of time wasted), the footprint of the NAS, the noise, the heat, etc.
A backup in one place isn't a backup. The 3, 2, 1 rule and all.
Meanwhile, there hasn't been a cloud provider without massive reliability or data loss issues. My NAS has better uptime than Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.
So you took it out of the shipping box, plugged it to power, and pressed the power button, and everything was up and running?
And since then you haven't had to update any software on it, reboot it, unplug and replug an ethernet cable, shut it down and opened it to add storage, etc.?
> it makes no sound while running
Looking at a basic NAS on Synology shows that it's around 20 dB, which is admittedly very little, but is not 0.
> and costs maybe pennies to run
Again, looking at the same NAS and using my actual price per kWH, it's around $10 a month.
> there hasn't been a cloud provider without massive reliability or data loss issues
My searches haven't turned up any article about a data loss from any of the 3 big cloud providers. Even the story here, while scary, is just about compressed files, not originals.
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I'm not denying that a NAS has advantages (the fact that it's a lot more than just a data backup), but in the context of backing up files, it's not at all convenient compared to using online solutions.
> costs maybe pennies to run.
Pennies per hour, per day, or per month?
I'm not saying it isn't under 40W - as you note, if it's idling properly, it's pretty easy to have a NAS including disks under 10W idle. But the electricity cost is not negligible when you are running something 24/7. Even 10W24hr30day is 7.2kWh per month, and most places cant count on 8c/kWh electricity anymore.
> My RPi 4b runs on a 18W power supply, which would put it at 432Wh per day
Which would be 13 kWh per month. If we're comparing to monthly fees for cloud storage, it's important to look at the same time frame.
I have two SSDs on it that are powered by the RPi itself, so the whole package is < 18W. Also, SSDs use way less power than HDDs.
> Which would be 13 kWh per month. If we're comparing to monthly fees for cloud storage, it's important to look at the same time frame.
Yes, running at max load. A more realistic load will be 3W/hr -> 72W/day -> 2kWh/month. That would put it at ~0.3€/month at a realistic load and ~1€/month at max load (0.15€/kWh where I live).
You also have to take into account there's other stuff running on such "NASes", like the PiHole, a git server, a plex server, which are going to cost you separately if you need them. On the other hand, my setup cost me ~300€ (RPi, charger, drives, USB-SATA adapters), which buys a whole lot of VPS and a whole lot of online storage.
[0]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
My home backup is going to be it's own problem after my death.
I'd say that the human body is just one very sophisticated I/O device.
The fact that we can't replicate it now doesn't mean that it wouldn't be possible after a millenia of engineering, even though this replacement device might as well be a partially organic one in the end.
That said, there are no guarantees that we don't fall into a sort of "dark age" of no more growth/research into any new directions, or don't wipe ourselves out altogether.
I think it’ll be possible to create inorganic ‘brains’ that have human-like subjective experience, because to think otherwise reduces to some form of vitalism, but I doubt we’ll be able to move specific individual consciousness across technologies.
Are you sure about that? That does not sound right to me.
Though, saying that, OP’s point about needing a human body to have human experiences may be correct if souls get a new human body in the afterlife - I’d just assumed liberated souls, like ghosts, had no physical form.
Nowadays it's only available inside the world of Black Mirror and similar fiction.