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Comment by oceanghost | Hacker News Reader

I've given this a LOT of thought.

I have several storage arrays of data (about 100TB currently). I've amassed every family photo I can get my hands on. Important TV, Movies, Books, Audiobooks.

I'm working on software to annotate the data and provide a "guide" of a sort of a "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer".

I'd like to be able to hand my daughter a hard disk or whatever the equivalent is-- of everything that was important to our family and to her intellectual development. In the case of my untimely death-- I'd like her to have a chance at avoiding some of the lessons I have paid entirely too much to learn.

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Years ago, my father was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, and given a 55% chance of surviving six months. The immediacy pushed him and my mother into writing out the book they'd been thinking about for years, a book on manhood for their sons.

He ended up surviving it, and actually being declared cured--chemotherapy+radiation worked really well for him. It was a terrifying time, though, and I was really glad that they took the time to write down these things for us in case we lost him. They ended up publishing the book and it's sold tens of thousands of copies, but for me it's still the book my father wanted me and my brothers to have if he wasn't there to talk about it.

What is the book?

My mother wrote a children's book called The Magic, about my brother & me. It wasn't pressured by death, but having something written for / about us by our parents is a very special treasure.

You might also consider creating a video of yourself explaining what these things are, why they are important and how to access and use the data.

That would also be a good opportunity to share thoughts with her that she may appreciate more when she has matured. Life seems to get in the way of saying some of the most important things. I have so many regrets about the conversations I was never able to have with my mom. She was a single parent and died at a young age. Our last conversation was an argument.

Wayyyy ahead of you :) But thank you :)

I too have scanned all the photographs from my family and my wife's family. The oldest is a tintype of my father's paternal grandparents, circa 1868. The scans are on a RAID 1 NAS, backed up nightly to another RAID 1 NAS, with other periodic backups. But it seems unlikely any of these copies will last another 150 years.

What if you print it to microfiche?

Perhaps consider making multiple copies to optical media using parity data on each volume. Writing rar and par files to multiple DVD's should suffice. There is of course the risk that not many people will know what a DVD or rar/par file is in 150 years.

Steven E. Foster, a bartender whose magnum opus was at one point available at mixdrinks.com[0] and later at brightredlipstick.com[1], had a section on the latter site labelled 'Look At Old Pictures Of My Relatives, So They Are Not Forgotten.' Here's an example: http://brightredlipstick.com:80/pictures2.html

He wrote 'Live Each Day - Make Your Life Extraordinary - To[sic] Soon It All Ends' in the header of those family pictures, and sadly it ended too soon for him; he died in 2016[2]; his obituary notes the he 'aspired to publish his self-written bartending book "Drinks for the 21st century."'

But his family photos were indexed by the Internet archive, and maybe now a few HN readers have seen them, and seen his own picture, and his memory lives on just a little bit longer.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19991012192746/http://mixdrinks....

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070403211755/http://www.bright...

[2] http://www.wacotrib.com/obituaries/foster-steven-edward/arti...

There's archival Bluray format called M-Disc which claims to have a several hundred year storage life and to be "impervious to environmental conditions". You can get the writers fairly inexpensively, and the discs are $88 for 5x100GB on Amazon.

I never believe the projected lives of the things-- but consider it like everything else to be part of a safety net. I burn the irreplaceable things to those in addition to a normal backup strategy.

Can you say more about the annotation aspect?

I don't want to say a lot about it because the idea is way, way ahead of its time. I will however point you to a book called "The Diamond Age". :)

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