Protect

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.

We recommend an external hard-drive with an installed operating system and file viewers as well as the data.

[technical details to come here...]

will it even boot in 50 years?

And who will refresh it every 50 years? Can you create a trust? Who will be the custodian?

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

On this site we look at:

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.

BACK UP YOUR DATA. Hard drives hardly ever fail these days. So it will never happen to you, right? Please don't wait until you have had this heartbreaking experience before you start backing up your data (pictures, documents, video, recordings....). Please learn from the grief of others and back up regularly.

There are four challenges to deal with in preserving memories over time:

• Physical decay of the medium. Most digital storage media don't last as long as paper, or even photo film.
• Physical loss or damage of the medium. With each passing decade the chances of fire, flood, theft, or accidental loss increase.
• Future access to the medium. Those finding it need to have the right equipment and software to read it.