Comment by batou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by batou | Hacker News Reader

I've solved this the easy way. The only "online service" I use is an IMAP box and run that using inbox zero. Everything important is archived on disk in eml files. We share all our passwords in a single keepaas database and everything we have data-wise is in a shared folder on a shared computer. Backups are all in known locations. We regularly empty our phones an cameras and transcode everything into neutral formats.

The digital life is 22Gb of photos and videos spanning 13 years so far.

So there isn't a digital life as such, just a pool of electronic memories and information which we share. I couldn't use anything deeper after watching a friend go through the painful process of losing everything tied to an ecosystem of a software vendor.

Oh and I'll only use a system that respects my control for my data. Currently this is windows 8.1 but with the introduction of 10, it appears I'm not going to have to dump that due to the incoming app ecosystem and hit Linux.

If this all looks like a lot of effort, you're only doing the work up front. Retrospectively if you don't do this, you're deferring a world of pain.

Indeed, I think that having a shared keychain is very important. I have heard of people planned to do such a thing, but never did before it was too late. Sorting out the digital life off- and online will be a mess without it. Do it today.

We have also been moving stuff out of data silos and are moving back to plain old files where possible. E.g. administrative stuff we share using Bittorrent Sync (because it is peer to peer and encrypted) and we store photos in Dropbox (because they are easier to share with family that way). We considered doing everything with BTSync, but on iOS the interface is too difficult for non tech-savvy family.

I tried to sync for several years and it never worked. I tried everything. Eventually we just moved to using one computer and sharing it. Its not healthy to spend all the time on it anyway. Having a pooled machine has a number of social benefits as well.

So we have a single laptop, three smartphones (my oldest daughter has one as well) and they're all handed in weekly to me for data extraction and archival.

The laptop is a Lenovo X201 so it can go anywhere and we have a docking station and full desktop setup if you need anything a little more healthy to use.

Did you consider something like a Synology NAS, which has free mobile apps for syncing?

Yes. I had one. It died suddenly and left me with a £400 bill for a new one. Fortunately I backed up the NAS to an external disk but from this and other experiences, I've come to a general rule:

the reliability of a backup system is inversely proportional to the number of moving parts

Hence why I use beyond compare to manually sync files to two physical mediums from the master copy on my laptop. One encrypted USB stick I carry on me at all times and one hard disk that lives in a fire safe.

Moving hard disks back and forth to my fire safe is a pain. A hardened usb disk that is itself fire-rated. That I would buy.

You would need one with the mass of a fire safe which somewhat nullifies the point.

Some companies sell fire-safe & waterproof HD enclosures which you can use without moving the disks.

How about a fire-safe with a female USB port on the outside, and a male USB port on the inside - both connected? That would be cool.

It's hard to make anything small fire-rated, due to thermal inertia (or rather, the lack thereof).

I'm surprised I haven't seen a NAS with the hard drive enclosure fire-rated.

wow, only 22gb in 13 years? Do you lower your media's resolutions before archiving them? I thought about doing that with most of mine... but I would still need to go through the collection one by one to avoid doing it on my favorite ones even if I used exif metadata to rate most of them.

All photos are ~1.2Mb jpegs straight from a Nikon d3100 these days. I don't archive raws or process them other than perhaps rotation. Videos are h264 with a reasonable profile although this will change one day.

The key to keeping it contained is to not keep everything. I'm not afraid to throw away stuff.

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