Google, Apple and Meta offer near-limitless digital basements in which to store photos, videos and important documents, but you should keep a copy of what you hold most dear.
I have many fears as a mother. My kindergarten-age daughter recently learned a game on the school bus called Truth Or Force. My youngest refuses to eat almost anything but Kraft Mac & Cheese.
I am “cloud complacent”, keeping my most important digital information not on a hard drive at home but in the huge digital basement provided via technology companies’ servers. As a child of the 1980s, I used to have physical constraints on how many photos, journals, VHS tapes and notes passed in seventh grade that I could reasonably keep. But the immense expanse and relatively cheap rent of the so-called cloud has made me a data hoarder.Heading into 2023, I set out to excavate everything I was storing on every service, and find somewhere to save it that I had control over.
This kind of data explosion is a result of economics, said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a non-profit group based in San Francisco that saves copies of websites and digitises books and television shows. Taking a photo used to be expensive because it involved film that needed to be developed.
According to a company spokesperson, 50 million people a year use Takeout to download their data from 80 Google products, with 400 billion files exported in 2021. But Fitzpatrick said he worried that when people stored their digital belongings on a company’s server, they “don’t think about it or care about it”.
I don’t remember what I learned about the gothic filmmaker but I do remember my friends’ horror when their weeks-old son, now 11, had a blowout and they had to beg a comically oversized diaper from a stranger. Note asks the kinds of questions most of us don’t: Will there be the right software or hardware to open all our digital files many years from now? With something called “bit rot”Individuals and institutions think that when they digitise material, it will be safe, she said. “But digital files can be more fragile than physical ones.”WHERE TO PUT IT
I felt as if I’d landed on an alien planet, so I turned instead to professional archivists and tech-savvy friends. They recommended two US$299 12-terabyte hard drives, one of which should have ample room for what I have now and what I will create in the future, and another to mirror the first, as well as a US$249 NAS, or network-attached storage system, to connect to my home router, so I could access the files remotely and monitor the health of the drives.
An easy place to start was the screenshots: The QR codes for flights long ago boarded, privacy agreements I had to click to use an app, emails that were best forwarded to my husband via text, and a message from Words With Friends that “nutjob” was not an acceptable word.
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