It may be helpful. Consider online backups for your important digital documents

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

Having gone 100% digital, I have battled what to do about backups. I have settled for offline storage. Separate drives at the house, another drive at my daughter, another drive at my sister in another state, and one master drive in a safe deposit box with my will and other documents. But I still worry.

A number of years ago, my daughter was getting her film (yes, film) developed my Kodak. They would return the negatives with the prints, plus create scanned images on their cloud server in your account. You could then create digital photo albums and send to your friends. You could print extra copies by Kodak if needed. My daughter thought this was perfect until...... one day Kodak sent her an email saying they were shutting the server down and she had two weeks to retrieve her photos or they would be deleted. After that, our trust in cloud servers became a little bit tainted. You are always at the whims of the company providing the services.

A bigger concern for me is that we no longer produce physical photo albums. We have digital ones, but very few of us takes the time (or expense) to create a physical album that can be passed down through the generations. I have albums from my mother and grandmother. True, they are starting to fall apart, but each photo has handwritten notation. To preserve them, I have scanned them in.

After my wife passed away last year, I realized that we had not created any physical albums. So I made myself a promise. I would create a digital scrapbook of Peg's life, have it printed and then give a copy to my daughter and each of my granddaughters. That way they would have something to remember her by. Just watching a slide show on the TV is NOT the same as setting down and flipping pages of an album. I freely admit that I am a long way from completing it. I have scanned in every photo I could find from anyone I could contact. I have scanned in Peg's writings that were on little post-it notes. These included bits of wisdom, recipes, and funny things our granddaughter had said, along with many other snippets.

My biggest concern is that, for many people, when they die, a large part of their digital life will also die, unless they have made plans for it. This is another concern with using cloud storage only. Will others be able to access it if something happen to you? That's why I have the hard drive in the bank safety deposit box.

One last comment. About four years ago, I had taken several hundred photos on Christmas. On Jan 1, my new year started off with me turning on my computer and finding out that the hard drive had completed failed. I panicked for a moment thinking I had lost the Christmas Photos. But then realized that after putting the new photos on the computer I had also updated the offline backup drive. With that experience, I increased my level of backups.

Sorry to ramble on.

Just wondering - What have you done to ensure that your digital life lives on past your death?

Bill
Smithville, NJ