Don't take passwords to your grave. Make sure others can access it all. My personal preference is to leave everythign wide open but others may have differnet needs and views. in that case you will need a digital trustee.

Enough about the challenges. What to do?

This plan is a work in progress. help us out....

1. Work out what you have.
   1. Start by drawing a treasure map of where it all is ("X and Y and Z mark the spot"), both digital and non-digital.
   2. make a list. Not of every file, but of "clumps" of data, e.g. family photos on the C drive; the photo CDs from my first marriage... Use a spreadsheet like MS-Excel or Google Apps
   3. decide what order you are going to assess them in
      

Without getting into the issue of data formats here, let's think about the sources of your archival data.

At the high level, your data comes from three primary areas; your personal life, your work life, and your community activities. Think about all three when you consider what is worth saving.

Your data will be scattered across:

• PCs, current and old, yours and other people's

This is one of the four issues in preserving memories over time: the physical media they are stored on.

Digital data can "fade" or get lost, just like paper - only much faster. You need to:

For the more technically minded, a good option for data security is a copy of the data in the garage or another out-building that will be safe if the house burns.

• the family, sworn to look after it
• a trust
• a museum
• a professional archivist (if such a thing comes into existence)
• If all else fails, a safe solid box, as if it were a bottle cast on the ocean

Make sure it can be accessed

Don't keep all your backups in your house. Even if you have a sprinkler system you might get hit by a meteorite or an elephant stampede or something.

REGULARLY (say monthly) move a copy somewhere else.

People propose all sorts of tedious schemes where you are supposed to go to a trusted person's house every week or month and swap hard-drives. Yeah right! How long is that program going to last? Back up online using one of the many services available.

I shoot more photos in a year than my Dad did in his life. There are more photos of my son's soccer team than were ever taken of my grandfather. (As of 2008 there are 2 billion photos on Flickr, and FIVE billion on facebook).

Until recently the challenge was to get enough data to adequately record the family history. Now we have the opposite problem, an embarassment of riches.

As of very recently, storing it is cheap. Finding something to put it in is now affordable, with home disk drives in the hundreds of gigabytes.

The challenges are managing it, and making it useful.

Modern file formats can seem enormous (video, high-resolution photos, sound recordings). Should you store these big files or compress them? It all depends what you want the file for.

For example image resolution can vary widely and so does the file size. Image resolution is often measured in ppi or pixels per inch, also called dpi, dots per inch. If you want to view images on screen, then 120ppi is fine (or even less), but print really needs 300ppi for a nice clear picture.

Slightly off topic for TDFT, but some fun: make modern photos look like old ones here and it's free (not even any ads). Most of you will want to click the "English" option at the top right first :-D