The way to think about us is more like a home insurance. When you purchase a policy, your home is covered if something happens to
it for one year. When it expires, you can renew it again. If the insurance goes out of business, you can choose another carrier or find another alternative.
It’s not so different with us. You purchase a subscription, and it covers you for one year if you pass away during that time, and you can renew it afterwards.
The services we offer never extend more than 6 months after one’s passing, so you don’t have to really be worried about us being in business for more than 18 months after you become a user, which is really not excessive and in the ballpark of most other services you use.
I've been thinking about this topic after I got married, and realized that I wanted to back up my wedding photos for 100+ years so my great-great-grandkids have the originals.
I wonder if this is a good use of blockchain technology. The company sets things up in such a way where there are resources and mechanisms to keep things running after the company collapses. Theoretically, as long as the s3 bills are paid, things keep running - the money pool pays for that, getting annual refreshes from data owners. Then money also exists for maintenance - s3 will shut down some day, but with money in escrow, developers can create proposals for maintenance that the token owners vote on.
Just a lot of hand waving away problems on my part, but I think it's an interesting question: how do people store data for 100+ years?
Don't do this. I somehow ended up with all the pictures of family going back to the 1800s. I have 5 suitcases full that I now have to scan.
Find the best representative photos, and upload them to Geni.com, Ancestry.com, MyHerritage.com, 23andme, etc. They are bound to survive from one of those sources.
Why don't you just pass on 6 suitcases instead of adding the risk of losing digital media. The current process has worked for your family for 200 years.
That's why you pick the best five from each year and print them in a small acid-free paper book.
You keep the gigantic digital repository as long as feasible (I burn to M-Discs), but for accessibility and long-term, pick your favorites in a way we have good reason to think can last for hundreds of years.
Shutterfly's interface is (was? been a while) kind of painful, but we've gotten good results from them.
Chatbooks makes it fairly brainlessly easy to produce books regularly (and had a hilarious ad a few years back focusing on the ease of use compared to other options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF2eKaOc3wo).
I can't swear to the longevity of the books - I never dug into the details of how they're printed, because I'm not especially concerned about making sure they last a hundred years.
It's the right strategy in principle, though, if that is your goal.
I disagree - digital is the only route. Printouts will get lost, bent, fires, floods, and lost.
The broader idea that I find interesting however is how to preserve digital content for > 100 years. It's okay if other people don't care about that - I do, and I think it's an interesting set of problem constraints, and was just wondering if anyone else has thought about it.
It's difficult to suggest an actual use case for blockchain, and I am far from an expert, but I think this could be an interesting innovative options for actually using distributed databases to control assets and make collective decisions in a decentralized fashion.
Do you have any insight on whether NeverTear would be good media for long-term archival? Waterproof and damage resistant is a big plus, but I wonder if they come at the cost of pigmant durability.
I can’t say for sure. I’ve never used the product you mention, but it is made out of polyester, which is supposed to be great for archival purposes. So…probably yes?
The way to think about us is more like a home insurance. When you purchase a policy, your home is covered if something happens to it for one year. When it expires, you can renew it again. If the insurance goes out of business, you can choose another carrier or find another alternative.
It’s not so different with us. You purchase a subscription, and it covers you for one year if you pass away during that time, and you can renew it afterwards.
The services we offer never extend more than 6 months after one’s passing, so you don’t have to really be worried about us being in business for more than 18 months after you become a user, which is really not excessive and in the ballpark of most other services you use.
Edit — Typo.