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Comment by pmcjones | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

What if you print it to microfiche?

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