Start with what matters
You do not need to save everything, and trying to will stop you saving anything. Start by making a list of the things you would be most sorry to lose: the photographs, the letters, the recordings of voices. Then find out where they actually are.
- Phones, current and old.
- Accounts with online services: email, photographs, messaging, social media.
- Old computers, and the drives in drawers.
- Disks, discs and memory cards in boxes.
Three copies
Keep three copies of everything that matters, on at least two kinds of storage, with one copy somewhere other than your home. A computer, an external drive and a copy kept with a relative or an online service will do. One copy is not a backup, and two copies in the same house are one fire away from none.
If you would rather the off-site copy lived on a machine you control than with a company, self-hosted software such as Nextcloud lets a household or a small group run its own.
Formats that last
| Material | Keep | Avoid relying on |
|---|---|---|
| Photographs | The originals as taken, plus JPEG copies if the originals use an unusual format | Copies that exist only inside one app or service |
| Documents | PDF for finished documents, alongside the originals | Formats that need a subscription to open |
| Messages | Regular exports, as plain text or HTML | The service itself |
| Audio and video | The originals, plus copies in a common format | Files that only play in one device |
Accounts and services
Online services close, and accounts are purged when nobody signs in. In our study for Half-Life, only 6 percent of a person’s accounts were still accessible to their family twenty years after their death. Export what matters once a year, and keep the exports with the rest of your archive.
Public web pages disappear too. If one matters to you, ask the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to save a copy. It takes a few seconds, it is free, and the Internet Archive has been doing this, independently of us, since 1996.
Write it down
A single page naming who should have access to your accounts, where your archive is kept and whether you would want to be remembered, forgotten or simply left alone will save the people you leave behind a great deal of trouble. Digital estates explains what to put on it.
Keep it up
- Once a year, open a sample of files from each copy, and check them against your checksums. Fixity explains how.
- Every five years or so, move everything onto new storage, before the old drives fail.
- When you change phones or computers, check that nothing was left behind.