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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I used to get prints of all of our photos when we first started dating. Then we switched to digital, a lot of which has been lost on old hard drives. When we got married we had a really hard time finding photos of us as a couple because most had been lost.

Now that we have kids we back up our photos in multiple places, but we also make sure to print out the ones we really like, just in case. The really good ones we print on canvas and hang on the walls.

But it's true, most of records would be lost if there were a global cataclysm that took out all digital records. That being said, I'm pretty sure our mortgage is only digital so at least we would own our house free and clear!

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Oh man, I hear you: I had a mess just like that, tried to find something to automatically sweep everything into a neat pile, couldn't find it, and ended up writing PhotoStructure: https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/

This looks fantastic. I have a lot of comments about my old photos stored in 4DOS Descript.ion files, since I was using ACDsee to organize them. Can you speculate how to save those?

Huh, I've never heard of that format. If you send an example to hello@photostructure.com I can take a look: best case, ExifTool will be able to read them already, and you can just add .ion as a sidecar extension.

This is just what I wanted for a long time, amazing to randomly come across it because I'd already given up thinking it doesn't exist.

The only feature it's missing - but I know this would be complicated and advanced - would be to scan for similar images and duplicates that don't exactly match. Ideally it would present them all and then I could manually mark for deletion what I want to get rid of.

So many duplicates. We were all so naive when digital photography first became a thing. I remember back in the day everyone recommended "keep all files, delete nothing, storage is cheap".

> That being said, I'm pretty sure our mortgage is only digital so at least we would own our house free and clear!

Very similar to what happens in Mr. Robot where the plan is to encrypt all of the biggest worldwide bank's records so that they're inaccessible, thus wiping out the majority of debt.

Spoiler alert!

but what about backups and/or other supporting documents? You'd have to hit multiple places at the same time, some of which aren't fully digital.

If the world suddenly turns into a Mad Max movie set, your debtors will still hunt you down. Don't just assume your debt will magically disappear.

How will they know who to hunt if all the records are gone?

Wouldn't matter. It'd be on you to prove you don't owe them money.

Creditors would be doing the hunting.

Thanks for the spoiler…

Afaict, they are referencing s04e09. It came out Dec 1 2019.

If you didn’t watch it yet, were you ever really going to?

Imo, spoilers without warnings are fair after 3 months time+ for TV shows and movies. Maybe even sooner.

New people are being born all the time who haven't had the opportunity to watch the entire history of television (or even just the best 10%). By spoiling a show that you've watched, you're denying them the opportunity to experience the joy that you had.

The logical conclusion of this attitude: "Therefore, all conversation of any form, especially any crossing generational boundaries, must cease immediately."

There is some information that people want to learn through conversation, some that people don't mind learning through conversation, and some that people actively want to avoid learning through conversation.

I don't know why you'd reach the conclusion that all information falls into the latter category.

> If you didn’t watch it yet, were you ever really going to?

Yes. I have the whole thing saved and did in fact plan on watching it eventually.

What? They're referencing the events of the first season. The whole first season was about making their data useless.

Don't worry, that's far from the most interesting plot point in Mr. Robot! Now, if the above commenter had spoiled any of the circumstances surrounding the described hack, then you'd definitely want to be angry. Knowing that hack happens is like knowing that there are dragons in Game of Thrones.

(This might be a controversial opinion, but if you've seen Fight Club, it's hard to watch Mr. Robot and not know exactly where things are going anyways. Of course, it's definitely a fun watch regardless!)

One of the worst data losses of photos I had was when apple switched from iPhoto (which I'd organized meticulously) to Photos. It wasn't until a few hard drive crashes later did I realize how poorly Photos imported the pictures. I found old iPhoto data files on an old Time Machine backup and was able to restore some, but anything that was linked was long gone. So most of the digital photos from my 20's are gone.

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