I’ve been thinking a lot about my digital footprint and what will happen to it when I pass — I know, a little morbid, but if I pass now, I’d think I would disappear from the internet within a few years. My domains will expire at some point. Hosting services will stop being funded. After a few years of inactivity, my accounts will be deleted — emails, public\/private photos and documents, work profile, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In high school, I remember in English class we read an except from a diary from the 16th century and I thought to myself, “wow, we can’t achieve physical immortality, but to have my thoughts read\/studied by a class of students some 400+ years later would be amazing!” And around the same time I remember watching a Max Headroom episode (S2.E2 Deities<\/a>) where the reporters go visit a church where “(they are) able to store cortical scans of its members and keep them on-line for the day when cloning is perfected and their personalities can be placed in new bodies<\/em>” (TVDB<\/a>). These ideas fascinated me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We’re not to the point where we can do cortical scans, but we do have a digital footprint that could be stored indefinitely. For awhile, I keep a written journal… that’s become a blog, now. I have a pile of photos, both physical and digital… I’ve been slowly converting the physical ones to digital. I have e-mail conversations with friends going back until the mid-90’s — nothing earth-shattering, but my digital connections. But all of that combined makes up a part of our digital footprint… Stuff like what I post on Facebook or what web-site I visited or what I posted on Reddit — even though a part of my digital footprint — isn’t something I’d consider taking into my digital afterlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve started using the Synology Photo app, trying to consolidate\/sort out my photos and images… Something happened around August, 2019… After Yahoo sold Fickr to another company… I didn’t renew my “Pro” account and my photo “back-ups” stopped… Shortly afterwards, I upped my iCloud storage… And I started using Google Photo as a backup, but I’m quickly running out of photo storage (I just checked, as of today, I’m under 1 TB of photos)… I have multiple copies of the same photos that it’s driving me crazy. I think problem started when I started looking at different back-up strategies; and has gotten worse over time. I now want to make sure I have a master copy on our NAS & then clean up what’s on iCloud, Google Photos, Amazon Photos, Flickr, etc. I realized with our trip to Japan, I probably took over 2,000+ images — quickly blowing through all of my on-line backup storage. I’ve decided it’s probably better to just keep 1 to 2 years of photos on-line, everything else should be move off to NAS\/Synology storage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve also given up on the idea of having unlimited on-line photo storage, unless I set up some kind of trust fund to curate some type of digital immortality…<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n