With around 180,000 people dying daily, I found more analogue ways of preserving my memories

Danie
preserving your digital memories

Reading an article about this published two days back in The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review, got me thinking yet again about this topic (as you do when you are past your 40’s or 50’s) and what I’ve gravitated towards in order to preserve some memories. Too many just think about backups, but backups are for own our convenience, to recover our lost data now or tomorrow.

In case you have not realised it, all those thousands of e-mails, photos, documents, etc you’ve saved online with your 100 GB or more cloud storage plan, are all wiped out in a split second when the service provider goes out of business one day, or your dormant account is just removed a year or two after your demise. Downloading it all to your PC hard drive? Well, who knows what to find where on your 1 TB or more of storage on your drive (if you did not encrypt it). Hard drives get stolen or damaged just as easily.

I’ve spent the last year sifting through thousands of old family photos, going back 100+ years, and these actually led me to one of my first solutions below…

  1. Every year, select some of your best photos – then use an online service to have them printed into a hard cover photo album, along with captions etc. These old analogue albums do stand the test of time as well as accessibility by relatives.
  2. My blog posts are all automatically archived from my WordPress site (via a plugin) to The Internet Archive, along with my static web pages.
  3. I’m using Google Documents to document my own life story, and have shared that to my daughter, so she can follow it as it develops.

As we get cleverer and cleverer with all sorts of new technology, social networks, AI, etc, we also realise that all of that is often very fragile when it comes to longevity, and archival periods that can stretch over 100’s of years. But what is of concrete importance is, if you don’t give some thought to it, and take some action, yours will just be wiped out.

If you have any ideas that can also add any practical value to this topic, please comment below, and I’ll add them to my original post.