[hvgk]

I think this is a resolution argument. Data should be curated carefully and reduced in resolution as it gets older. If you’re never going to look at it, it’s probably not worth keeping.

As per photos you don’t need 11 pictures of those muffins you baked in 2003. One will probably suffice, if you even care about them 18 years later that is.

The same goes for health data. But overall trends over 20 years are really useful as you get older. Expected decline is inevitable but unexpected decline may be indicated earlier and result in some preventative action to improve your quality of life. There are a lot of long term metrics appearing in Apple health like walking stability on that front.

On photos, I’m not sure what I’d do with 200,000 photos. I have 7,623 which span 4 generations and 125 years at the moment. I spend a lot of time curating these photos, adding metadata, editing and pruning garbage. They are all managed with Apple’s native Photos app which is good enough for the job (non destructive, sqlite DB underneath it, easy to back up)

[NoboruWataya]

Out of interest, what is the argument for reducing resolution other than space concerns? Fitness data is not really space-intensive. I recently ran a marathon and the associated GPX file is less than a megabyte; the FIT file is about 180KB. I don't really think even 30 years of regular running data would come to much. I appreciate cycling data will take more space but not that much more.

My point is, it seems like once you have put in place the habits and technological solutions necessary to store fitness data, it actually takes more effort to reduce the resolution of older data. I'd rather have data and not want it than want it and not have it, but then I am an almost pathological hoarder so maybe it's just me.

[hvgk]

It’s mostly the ability to be able to locate it afterwards i.e. to improve the signal to noise ratio. I track hikes I do with a GPS and keep the GPX files afterwards but generally don’t refer to them unless uploading curated copies to OS Maps here in the UK for other people to use. So after a few years I nuke them. As for health data, it’s quite large. My apple health data is around 100 Meg compressed now and a lot larger, in the order of 1Gb, decompressed.

I am not a hoarder as a counterpoint. I am always looking at ways to reduce what I have and remain focused. I lived with a hoarder in a house full of trash and don’t want to be that person to someone else. He also had 4TB of photos and videos that needed to be dealt with.

I think at the end of the day my life can probably be compressed to a few images and a few paragraphs…

[acadapter]

>On photos, I’m not sure what I’d do with 200,000 photos. I have 7,623 which span 4 generations and 125 years at the moment.

Some of them might be historically interesting enough to preserve on Wikimedia Commons, for example if they depict places that look very different today, or stuff that you don't see in everyday life anymore.

[hvgk]

That’s quite possible. I have around 150 historical photos i.e. over 100 years old which depict family life in Switzerland in the 1800s. I will look into that. Thanks for the suggestion.

[detaro]

Keeping lots of photos is easier than whittling them down to some percentage subset.

[hvgk]

It is until someone leaves you 4TB of them to deal with. Where do you even start?

I am a big proponent of not leaving my kids a pile of trash to sift through. See my other comment on this matter for background.

[GekkePrutser]

But in 10 years or so, 4TB won't be a lot of data. It's also not really now. My NAS has about 85 now.

They could just have it on a portable drive and look through it whenever they want. It's not like they have to catalogue every picture :)

[hvgk]

4TB is a huge amount of data. And it’s costly to keep data spinning. 4TB storage an in apple device is going to set you back a lot of money for example. Not everyone has a NAS or the ability to run one and even more importantly to back it up effectively. It becomes a large monkey on your back and a cost and not an advantage.

Looking at my device storage, I have 91Gb online for 5 people. That’s everything we have ever done. Because we care enough to look after it and curate it.