- Most people are not as interesting as they think they are
- It's unlikely that your grandkids would have the same interests as you
- If anything in your NAS was relevant to the family, your SO would have kept a copy of it in her icloud instead of using your self-hosted photo viewer over tailscale
- Once you're old you almost certainly won't be using modern software and file formats. Accessing your data will be incredibly inconvenient
>Once you're old you almost certainly won't be using modern software and file formats. Accessing your data will be incredibly inconvenient
This isn't true. Sure, no one uses WMV or ZOO these days, but you can still get tools to read them. But those were also not-so-popular formats/codecs that were replaced quickly by better stuff. MP3 is also old, but still very ubiquitous. Furthermore, the specs and software for modern file formats (like audio/video codecs) are all publicly available. People will still be able to read h.264 videos 50 years from now, don't worry.
> - Most people are not as interesting as they think they are
> - It's unlikely that your grandkids would have the same interests as you
The bar is pretty low: your grandkids only need to be interested enough to keep some tiny amounts of data around. (Assuming that data capacities keep growing, your perhaps dozen of TiB of data will fit on a thumb drive in the future, or perhaps even an email attachment.)
Also your descendants don't need to find your data interesting for the same reasons you do. You might snap some pictures of your travels to famous landmarks (which your grand kids don't care about, because they can't find much better photos of the Eiffel Tower online), but they might be interested in how fashion changed over time, or weight or smartphones or whatever is in the background.
It's very, very hard to preserve only exactly what you do, and nothing else. There's always context, and people might be interested in the context, even if they ain't interested in you.
Btw, there's lots of diaries and autobiographies published. Some of them quite popular.
- It's unlikely that your grandkids would have the same interests as you
- If anything in your NAS was relevant to the family, your SO would have kept a copy of it in her icloud instead of using your self-hosted photo viewer over tailscale
- Once you're old you almost certainly won't be using modern software and file formats. Accessing your data will be incredibly inconvenient