[Spooky23]

Figure out what you really need and print it on good paper. Put that in a safe place, away from direct light and dampness.

Save the rest on two of Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, some other cloud storage, a backup service or copy to a computer in your home. Make your selection based on things that you will "touch" in some way at least every 12-24 months. Everything else will fail in a few years.

Don’t save crap you don’t need. Don't futz around with optical media, tape or other nonsense. Don't buy safes or safe deposit boxes unless that's going to be part of your routine in some way.

[ghaff]

>Don’t save crap you don’t need.

I tend to agree with this although it can be hard to determine what you won't want/need in advance and it probably takes at least some effort to winnow things down.

That said, I'm in the middle of going through my photos right now and deleting a bunch of stuff. (Which is a big job.) It's not so much for the storage space as I'll "only" be deleting a few hundred GB. But it's a lot easier to look for stuff and manage it when you don't have reams of near-identical or just lousy pics. One of my takeaways from this exercise is that I should really be better at pruning when I ingest a new batch.

[Spooky23]

It is!

I think that effort is worth it. As it stands, we've all become digital hoarders as the up-front cost to accumulate stuff like photos and documents goes to zero. The problem is you're dumping LOTS of cost into the future.

Photos are a big thing for me.

Initially, I used applications (Picasa and later iPhoto) to tag photos with metadata to indicate importance, etc. Applications tend to have zero respect for to commitment to preserving metadata. So by the time my kids are going to college, my family is going to have 200,000+ photos alone. What's the point? Am I getting pleasure (or to borrow from the Netflix organizational guru "Does it bring joy?") from this data?

Personally, my new strategy, having been burned by the tools is a pyramid:

1. Print and Frame/preserve important or significant pictures (Say 20-30/year)

2. Curate others that we care about. (Say 500/year or 5-8%)

3. Purge stuff of no value. (Say 2500/year or ~25%)

Based on my "performance" today, if I keep at it, I'll be able to reduce the rate of growth.