[burnieflanders]

I'll pay annually to reduce this risk. For some reason I doubt google would just delete my data if I went into a coma for a year or two, but I can't back that up with a source. It's just a hope.

I'd consider paying 10 years in advance if I could tbh.

[brudgers]

Google also cancels products and companies change terms and conditions.

Suppose you get issued a replacement credit card number and forget to update all your online accounts?

The cloud provides convenience, but it does not care about your photos as much as you do.

The best way to preserve pictures is printing them out and putting the prints in a box. It has a track record.

CD-R is the best digital format for archiving.

[warrenm]

>CD-R is the best digital format for archiving.

And now you have to store hundreds of CDs somewhere in a climate-controlled manner

You're gonna get what ... 100 (maybe? probably more like 50-60 (if they're high-quality images)) photos per CD? Say you [only] have a 1000 photos - you need 10-20 CDs

Ramp that number up to what seems to be a lot more common (say 100+ "keepers" per month), and you're burning a CD every month just to keep pace, or about a dozen a year

And that is just photos - haven't gotten into video yet (an increasingly-common file type)

Then you also need a way to read them later (integral CD/DVD drives are not especially common any more on most systems - so you also need to keep extra hardware handy)

And that external hardware is going to need devices that connect to it - USB-A is still pretty common ... but it's becoming less so

Anyone remember Firewire? SCSI? I do ... but they have all gone the way of the dodo bird

CDs degrade over time - commercially-produced less than home-burned...but they're distinctly not permanent media

If you move to DVD-R, you expand the number of images you can store from ~50-100 per disc to ~400-800 ... so you're burning one (just for photos) every quarter to half year - just to keep up

Or you can pay Apple $10/mo for 2TB[0] of storage

Or BackBlaze a $100/year[1] for "unlimited" storage (there's a limit somewhere ... but it's pretty high) for a single user

If you want to run your own archiving service/process ... be my guest (I do it by running NextCloud on a server) - but it is not for everyone (I also pay for OneDrive via my 365 subscription and the 2TB iCloud service for all our family devices (laptops, iPads, iPhones))

---------

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-afri/108047

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/pricing

[brudgers]

For $10/month or $100/year you’re not paying enough for someone to care about your pictures.

[warrenm]

Au contraire - I am paying them enough (along with millions of others of customers) to care about their whole infrastructure

[brudgers]

Your pet data's importance is 1/(n * million) for a company that deals in cattle not pets.

[warrenm]

And yet ... because their infra is good enough for everyone, it is FAR more than good enough for me :)

[warrenm]

>The best way to preserve pictures is printing them out and putting the prints in a box. It has a track record.

Now you move to image degradation, risk of loss to fire, water, etc

[brudgers]

In my adult life. I’ve had one flooded house and one burglary. Neither affected my printed photos. The thieves took my computers and tools. My pictures weren’t stored under water pipes…they have never been stored in the kitchen where fire is most likely either.

On the other hand I’ve had many dozens of declined/replaced/expired credit cards. Some have glitched online transactions.

I have also been laid up sick and recovered from surgery. Eventually I will die. Maybe my online accounts will be continuously maintained. Maybe not.

The shoebox of pictures will still be there in the closet even if I stopped thinking about it many years before. And it will be easy for someone to know what it is. A bill for $10/month is the kind of thing executors get rid of.

The cloud is great for access. But it is fragile. In the end it’s all Geocities, just at scale.

[warrenm]

>The shoebox of pictures will still be there in the closet even if I stopped thinking about it many years before. And it will be easy for someone to know what it is. A bill for $10/month is the kind of thing executors get rid of.

Random shoe boxes of thousands of photos will get chucked by the executors - no one has time to go through them

No one cares

So ... if you're only worried about them maybe surviving your passing, don't worry: they're all going to the great dustbin in the sky (or in the front yard)

[brudgers]

My spouse or child are the my most likely executors. Maybe they keep the box, maybe they don't. If they keep it, it can just go back in the closet.

Nothing critical has to happen next month and every month thereafter. There's no financial tradeoff to be considered. No need to doom scroll at a computer.

And if there is something that speaks to them, they can hang it on the wall. If you don't print, you don't really care that much about the pictures anyway. There's nothing wrong with that, making pictures is fun.