How are you preparing your digital life for posterity?

November 17, 2006 6:33 PM

How are you preparing your digital life for posterity?

I've had the the opportunity to browse my grandparents' lives in shoeboxes. My life is behind a password on my computer and various web sites.

When I kick the bucket, after all, it'd be a surprise if I didn't, I'd like my family—hopefully kids, grandkids and great grandchildren—to have an opportunity to stitch my life together through ephemera. Are you doing anything?

posted by pedantic to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Open a flickr account, and prepay?
posted by SirStan at 6:55 PM on November 17, 2006

Flickr has too many dependencies.

1. Will the company be around?
2. How do I relay which account is mine?

There are others, I'm sure. Newspaper can last 100 years, if kept in a cool dry place. I need one cool dry place.
posted by pedantic at 7:05 PM on November 17, 2006

Sorry, I was just kidding.

Honestly, storing photos on a PC is useless, and boring. No one is ever going to want to discover their uncles digital library of photos. Print them out, put them in an album.
posted by SirStan at 7:12 PM on November 17, 2006

Too right. I'm wondering if anyone made the effort, ergo the question.
posted by pedantic at 7:28 PM on November 17, 2006

I've got all my pics (up until this year) backed up on hard disks in two countries. They are in sealed antistat bags, in reasonably cool rooms. You can get 40-80 gig disks for almost nothing, these days, cheaper than DVDs or CDs, with better life. Copy your important files there - with a simple file system like FAT16 or FAT32, not NTFS, and store them in a box with a USB interface.

That should get you ten years out from now. Back up every 3 months or so and they won't miss much. In ten years we may have a more permanent form of storage.

For really crucial shit I use MiniDisc. I have an archive of email on HiMD. Because MD is magneto-optical, it's a really, really hardy format. The players may fail but the disks will not. Unfortunately the players are not so hardy but I'm counting on one of my three working in the situation that I really need it.

Now, you can back stuff up all day, but if no one knows about it, it's worthless. Let your family know about these resources and how you think they should preserve them. Name files meaningfully wherever possible, or at least put them in meaningful folders "Vacation 2006" or whatever. Context is key. Exif data will reveal time and date to them, but not much more. Be sure to label the physical disk, in a very legible way, on the top side. Mine say "DO NOT FORMAT: FAKE'S PHOTO ARCHIVE" on them in indelible ink.

In my case, I gave a copy of all my passwords and the locations of all disks to my little brother, who is computer savvy and trustworthy. He doesn't know it yet, but on one of the sealed disks is a copy of my Gmail password, with instructions to delete my account to prevent all of my spam from being revealed to the public in the future.

Again, think hard disks and contextual information. Use open software wherever possible, or at least software that uses a spec'ed format. I use thunderbird to archive mail because anyone can read the mailbox format. I use JPG and DNG for the photos because anyone can read that format. I use IDE disks because they've been around forever and are likely to be readable long into the future.

If you're really crazy about readability, include copies of the software that you used to create the files. Photoshop for PSDs, a good viewer like IRfanview for JPGs, your mail client, etc. Doubtless they'll be able to run them virtualized for years to come. We can still run mainframe OSs, after all.

I don't trust services like Flickr or Gmail with my data - not as a backup service. That's simply ignoring how fast the internet changes. And in the case of Flickr, it's near-impossible to get things back out once they go in.
posted by fake at 7:29 PM on November 17, 2006

No one is ever going to want to discover their uncles digital library of photos.

Totally disagree. Photos represent something personal - a slice of somebody's life- especially because not everyone gets to see all of them. On point: my cousin Lisa (the same age as me, my "equivalent") shot herself in the chest a few years ago.

I don't know if she had a digital, but I think she did, and I know she had a hotmail account and some online life. I never knew what her life was really like, since we lived cross-country and saw each other only a few times a year. But, you know, I'd fucking love to have that insight now, since I can't ask her myself. What did her friends look like? What places did she frequent? Was she one of those intolerable people that takes thousands of cat photos? Was there a clue to her suicide? Hopes? Dreams? Loves? Maybe your uncles are uninteresting, but that statement just doesn't generalize, sorry.

Print them out, put them in an album.

Good advice. I still think it's easier to hand DVDs/disks/flash around to the family, and it won't require re-scanning. We're talking about the future, here, where people are more likely to have computer skillz and hardware.
posted by fake at 7:45 PM on November 17, 2006

Are formats like .jpg likely to be readable a hundred years from now?
posted by jayder at 8:40 PM on November 17, 2006

Are formats like .jpg likely to be readable a hundred years from now?

As long as there are computers of some form, yes.
posted by o0o0o at 9:16 PM on November 17, 2006

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. About how I would be percieved if I was to be hit by a bus tommorow (or some other equally morbid thang).
My brother knows the address to my livejournal (don't laugh) but not the password. I also keep a handwritten journal that is far more personal. I have a lot of pictures in my imageshack account, which is accessible from my computer.

It's an interesting thought, and is definitely one I will have to contemplate before shuffling off this mortal coil.
posted by sperose at 11:46 PM on November 17, 2006

Not for posterity, but because after we got our first digital camera I felt overwhelmed by all the pics on the computer, I started a routine: about every 2 months, I upload all my pics to the computer, pick the ones I want to print, get them printed by one of those places you upload photos to and they send them in the mail, and put them into a photo album, or into my kids' scrapbooks. Out of 100+ pics I've taken, I might print 30 or so. (I have small kids, so these numbers are relatively high right now.)

Now that I'm more comfortable with pictures on the computer, with making albums in iPhoto, etc., it feels less urgent for my own purposes to put the pics into albums, but I still do it for "posterity," by which I mean my own kids. I'm ambivalent about long-term pictures--we have my partner's parents' and grandparents' pictures, loose in boxes as they left them, and they are a mix of wonderful and frustrating, since there are so many locations and people we can't identify. Not sure how interested "posterity" is in our snapshots, but just in case I use photo albums that have a space for me to write a brief description, usually names, dates, locations.

Were you only asking about pictures? Your question didn't specify. I've had a similar question floating around in my head about the hundreds of pages of journal I've typed on my computer over the last 15 years--really accelerating since 2000. I haven't wanted to print them all out, because that would be a lot of printing and paper and storage. But just in case they were of interest to my progeny, I'd like them to be accessible not just on my computer, I think--paper does keep better than electrons, and I'd certainly have been interested in reading my mother's journal if she'd kept one.

This reminds me that I should put the computer passwords in the file with the print copy of our wills...off to do that now.
posted by not that girl at 8:50 AM on November 18, 2006

No, it wasn't only pictures. I take photos and write a journal as well, so the question is open-ended.
posted by pedantic at 9:54 AM on November 18, 2006

See the Long Now foundation for metaphysical issues relating to this. Great question!
posted by lalochezia at 11:37 AM on November 19, 2006