Comment by sdcfgy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdcfgy | Hacker News Reader

Some advice from someone who's done it wrong for years and dealt with dead people who have done it wrong for years.

Firstly don't try and run a corporate level backup solution or NAS with terabytes of storage and tape at home. You're going to drop dead one day and everyone will hate you for what you leave them to deal with. They will have no idea how to pick through the remains to get important stuff out. It took me a whole 3 days, as someone who knows how this works, to get into a dead relative's NAS appliance and find any mention of any info to get into his EV which had basically bricked itself in the driveway while he was in hospital.

Secondly, delete everything. Not joking. Delete as much as you can. Everything you've watched, delete it. All the old emails, delete them. Tracks you don't like on CDs you've ripped, delete them. Old software ISOs, delete them. Thousands of photos of the same thing taken 1 second apart, delete them. Thousands of PDFs of books you will never read, delete them. I went down from a whopping 8TB to 300Gb doing that and it's still shrinking monthly. Eventually it'll fit on one mediocre computer and that makes life so so so much easier.

Then look at your backup strategy. It'll look simple then. Mine is three external disks.

1. 1TB T7 shield (not encrypted) which lives at my partner's house and gets an rsync once a month.

2. 1TB T7 shield (encrypted) which lives in my bag and gets an rdiff-backup once a week.

3. 2TB Lacie HDD (not encrypted) which lives in my fire safe at home and gets an rdiff-backup once a week.

If I drop dead, my partner can just plug the thing into her computer and get stuff off it.

I'd avoid the cloud if possible as well. One of the worst situations I've seen is someone who confidently pushed their NAS contents to S3 and then when the NAS blew up they had to pay a lot of money in transfer to get it back again. Hundreds of dollars in fact. On top of the price of a new NAS. That might be a last resort option but it should NEVER be the first line backup.

Don't make your life any more complicated than it needs to be. I implore you.

> I went down from a whopping 8TB to 300Gb doing that and it's still shrinking monthly.

Just hours ago on another post I had commented

> discard/reject/delete: ≈400GB → 25GB → 3GB (< a decade ago; I remember) (I was shocked to see how little of that really mattered).

This is one of the most important aspect of managing your personal data in any meaningfully sane and sustainable (!) way.

Then being deliberate about one's digital footprint.

I don't particularly like the idea of my relatives sneaking into my files when I am dead. I destroyed all my father's files when he passed to respect his privacy.

everyone should do this, but it is difficult. imo, it is better to talk with your parents beforehand (if possible) to understand what they want to share with you and what they do not.

99% of people don't know or don't care or don't decide to deal with it until they are past being able to deal with it. It's difficult.

I've seen tears shed because a wife couldn't get into her dead husband's iPhone to get the photos off from their final holiday together.

Technology is HORRIBLE in this space socially speaking.

The problem with this is relatives may need to when it comes to dealing with wills and assets later. Naive legal statements like "I leave my car to Bob" become rather difficult when the car is tied into cloud accounts, locked EV chargers and weird subscription services. It becomes a whole digital forensics operation.

I personally have no problem with them going through my stuff. Not the "I have nothing to hide" defence. I just don't give a crap.

With respect to my personal situation, my father took thousands of photos of me, my children etc back as far as 2002. Sent me a selection low res jpegs of them by email. I was thrilled when I got the original RAWs from his NAS in the end. There was so much stuff in there I had forgotten that he hadn't sent.

Consider using a local backup solution to store your and your family's digital assets. This way, you can easily access and share them later. You can start with a free tool like Telemetry Blocklist to ensure your backup solution isn't sending any data to the cloud. If you need more advanced features, Backup Agent can help you encrypt and back up your local AI stack, including photos and other files.

Adding more technology to the problem isn't a good solution. It multiplies the problems.

I have a set of files in my true offline backup that my family (or other executor) will have access to should I pass. This is things like bank details and such, credentials for online accounts & other services so they can close them (and perhaps archive things like photos if they don't already have copies), so that they can close off my affairs with minimal faf.

Everything else will be inaccessible if I'm not around. This also means less faf for them: all the info they need to care about is in that package, they don't need to look at the huge disorganised pile of everything else to find the information that they might need.

Yes. My instructions are basically to destroy or erase everything and don't let any device with storage fall into unknown hands. Not that there is anything there and everything is routinely encrypted, but there is still a chance that some of the data could be used for identity theft or other harm to someone else. None of the devices or data is that valuable.

I'd say if you want someone to have data or access, you should work that out in time.

But delete everything is good advice. I'd emphasize also keeping some list of services that you may have accounts or logins in and delete and close and erase every single one that you're not using.

not sure if i got this right, but it sounds like you experienced some things and you want to share something, but you are telling others how to live instead.

It's more a tale of woe to remind everyone that your technology choices may affect yourself and others in ways that you don't think about up front.

Take what you want from it. Discard what you don't.

i am more of the position of most human generated information should be ephemeral. for instance, i wish this site would let individuals have that need met, alas.

no information is so important to violate others' right to their own property.

so i contribute as little as possible, in the name of "community", per the guidelines.

That information I'm talking about is mostly photos of me and my kids. They might want those. They can choose.

yeah, i mean, that might be meaningful, or not. i have thousands of pictures of my grandparents, great grandparents, etc that none of their kids (or many grandkids, great grandkids, etc) wanted.

seems like, eventually (mostly) no one cares

Yes exactly. I have 2 photos of my grandmother and about an A4 page of text. That's about all I expect to remain of me in 100 years.

I agree not to use corporate level stuff for private life. Yourself will forget how to troubleshoot it after 5 years, family will have no idea what to do with it. External encrypted/unencrypted USB drive is really sufficient.

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