Storing Family Data

Long term strategies for data storage involve asking bigger questions about the purpose of media storage

While I haven’t given up on all COVID data, I’m moving my personal time from working with COVID data to catching up on personal projects that have fallen aside in the last two years. The first project on my list of things to catch up on is to increase my family media resilience. I wanted to share that here because I think the topic is interesting.

I’m taking the time to make sure that the photos and videos of my family survive as long as possible. With the advent of digital media, we have the ability to create media at an astonishing rate. In the last 10-15 years, my personally produced media, largely captured on my phone or with digital cameras, has become a map of my life and a record of my children’s lives.

As wonderful as it is to have that record saved for me, it is incredibly fragile. A forgotten password or an account hack could wipe out a decade of the record of my life. That is unacceptable to me, so I’ve developed a strategy for managing family data that is not too complex but will hopefully survive me.

This topic may seem dry, so if you’re uninterested in the technical details, skip ahead to Tier 4. That’s where the important stuff happens.

• Tier 1: Default Data

• Tier 2: Local Backups

• Tier 3: Physical Backups

• Tier 4: Biometric Backups