
Your Personal Archiving Project: Where Do You Start? - diodorus
http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2016/05/how-to-begin-a-personal-archiving-project/
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kijin
I wonder how encryption, if it indeed becomes as widely used as many of us
hope it does, will affect the ability of future historians to read all these
archives.

All of my computers and backups are encrypted. If I were to drop dead tomorrow
or suffer some kind of memory loss, 99% of the documents and pictures I own
will turn into meaningless blobs, assuming the cryptography in the products I
use are any good. I have no intention to print out the keys and give them to
someone while I'm still young and healthy. Part of the reason is that I
believe those files should die with me. There's nothing incriminating, nor
anything particularly embarrassing, it's just nobody else's effin' business.
That's what privacy means to me.

And yet, it is the business of historians and librarians to poke into dead
people's private documents and learn from them. In an ideal future society,
maybe it will be historians, not spooks, who try to break commonly used
encryption methods.

~~~
ridgeguy
If your data dies with you, the rest of us lose whatever insight your data
might have given us.

Suggestion: leave decryption instructions with (attorney, loved one, safe
deposit box, etc.) so we don't miss your take on life. Someone (can't know
who) may benefit and spend a moment thanking you.

~~~
anowlcalledjosh
Shamir's Secret Sharing[1] seems like it would be a good mechanism to encrypt
decryption keys with - you can give a part of the key to several people, and
require that a certain number of them put their keys together to decrypt the
information.

[1]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing)

~~~
theoh
Shamir's approach is just one option for secret sharing, so you are being
overly specific.

The Wikipedia page for secret sharing links to
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine)

Apparently the word has been use to refer to secret sharing. It hints at the
problem with using this strategy to preserve access to encrypted data: all the
sharing parties will die eventually.

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hackuser
The most difficult issue I've encountered is identifying a format to use. Here
are some specifications, which I think are widely applicable:

* Readable 100 years from now. If that sounds crazy, consider whether your family currently has photos 75-100 years old? Ours does, and I don't think it's unusual. Come to think of it, possibly the factor that determines the age of a family's archive is how long they have had access to cameras.

* Maximum fidelity: Complete and correct, over time. This involves resolution, color gamut and some sort of color correction (I'm not quite sure; I'm no color expert), and error correction for the ravages of time.

* Metadata: Stored in the same file as the image (otherwise the relationship between image file and metadata file will almost certainly be lost in 100 years), readable 100 years from now (UTF-8 seems the obvious choice), machine-readable and parsable for building databases, user-defined fields, and editable (to add and update information after the image is created).

* End-user control of data: That online service you're using might not be around in 100 years, or even in 1.

Maybe I'm missing one or two specs here, but does anyone know the recommended
solutions? What do professional archivists use?

~~~
moonfern
Pdf/A and xml based formats in theory. And in general use open source
software. In practice use the Odf format because I support that and it does
what you want. And don't use pdf/A because too many implementations are
pretending they produce pdf/A while they don't.

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koolba
> First, approach your collection as a single unit of stuff. Don’t dwell on
> individual photos or letters yet. Think about the entire collection as a
> mass of related things. Kells said, “You’ll scare yourself if you think, ‘I
> have two hundred things.’ The project will seem bigger.” It is one
> collection.

This is good general advice for solving any problem, from archiving a lifetime
of curios to building a complicated software project.

~~~
dangero
One of my first jobs out of college I was stuck on a bug for several days and
I was very obviously in panic mode with a deadline looming. An older engineer
agreed to help me if I met him at his office at 7am. Up bright and early he
greeted me at his office door and immidiately asked me to demo the bug. After
seeing that I had a grasp of the issue he didn't try to troubleshoot. He just
smiled and said, "You'll figure it out. Just ask yourself what is one thing
you could do right now to get closer to solving the problem. That's what I
always do and something always comes to me." With that he stood up to indicate
the conversation was over and escorted me out of his office. I'm 35 now and it
hasn't failed me yet.

~~~
pjmorris
Great story and great tip. Thank you for sharing.

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ams6110
_or worse, “I’ll just get rid of it all.”_

No, that's really the best thing. Don't keep a lot of crap. Even sentemental
crap. It clutters your life, physically and psychologically.

~~~
tetrep
i agree. it's quite cathartic to think back on all the information i've lost
over the years, vague memories of past events that mainly live on through
their consequences on my life and personality.

although some things, especially technical knowledge, are great to
archive/store for later retrieval. i just don't feel the same for personal
things. i think it's healthy to forget, especially in the information age
where being able to do so is practically a luxury.

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kcorbitt
The problem with sorting physical objects is that it's basically like
inserting everything into a database for later retrieval, except you're only
allowed to have one index (whatever you choose to base your categories on).

It's often better to scan things like photos and documents and tag them; that
way you don't have to decide ahead of time how you're going to search them.

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mlucero
I always have this joke I tell which I'm starting to get more serious about.
I'd like to get a medium size statue of myself made that I can hand down. It's
hard to lose and would need to be deliberately destroyed(or disaster) to stop
existing.

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jedc
Relevant project that's usable now:
[https://camlistore.org/](https://camlistore.org/)

