Back in September 2022 I visited the Berkshire Record Office as part of the Heritage Open Days and was shown how important records are preserved and restored. At the end of the post, I wondered how future digital records might similarly be stored in future.
I found myself pondering this once more when I was thinking about future planning including the dull but necessary tasks of ensuring our wills are up-to-date and that we have a lasting power of attorneys etc. Having these in place will hopefully ensure that our worldly belongings will end up in the right places without too much fuss. It won’t help ensure that my expensive vinyl collection isn’t given away nor will it help my Williams memorabilia end up in a suitable home but at least I know it is catered for.
What, however, will become of those things stored only somewhere in the cloud that you can’t see or touch and in many cases, people wouldn’t even know existed?
For me, this includes:
- Diary entries (stored in Day One – currently 4,694 entries)
- These blog posts (self-hosted WordPress – 743 posts)
- Spreadsheets of books I’ve read, films I’ve seen and gigs I’ve attended
- Media (local server and cloud – 86,150 photos and videos)
- Family history records (all over the place but mainly in iCloud)
There are almost certainly other things that I haven’t considered (the 51,000+ notes and documents in Evernote and my lovingly written code for example) and will have to come back to but the above is the main things I am concerned about.
What’s the Issue?
When everything was physical there was a limit on just how much you could store at home which is why my parents have only a few photo albums and a handful of loose pictures. I, on the other hand, have a few photo albums and another 86,000 photos and videos stored on a server and backed up to the cloud.
If someone was charged with clearing the house they would easily find the photo albums but would anyone think to look at the content on the computer? As for those stored in the cloud as soon as the subscription was cancelled, they would be deleted and would be gone forever. Therefore, not only is securing the assets important but also informing those who will need to do something with them.
Securing the Assets
The priority should have been all our family photos and videos but as they sit on a server in our house it was the assets that weren’t under my control which become the pressing concern. These would disappear when the money stopped and gone would be all my blogs – this one along with my technology blog and my Williams fan site.
The question that needed resolving was what format should I store them in. I quickly rejected just producing a database dump and a zip file of the images etc. Instead, I opted for a nicely formatted PDF file very similar to the export that you can produce from the Day One journaling app.
This would be easy I thought as I could surely find a WordPress plugin to do what was required? A number do exist but I couldn’t get any of them to work at all so I rolled my own. Now I just press a button once a month and the output is dropped into a folder in iCloud. Sorted.
The spreadsheets held in Google Drive were easier as I could just export those into Microsoft Excel format and then put them into the same folder.
My ropy code was also dealt with as in GitHub public repositories with open source code can opt-in to the Archive Programme so that sorted that too as far as I was concerned.
Education and then what?
Now that they are secured and all pretty much in one place I just need to make sure that people know that they are there. Of course, this still leaves the question of what someone does with all these digital assets and, in particular, all the photos as we are talking several terabytes of data.
Sometimes I think physical assets are much easier to deal with.
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