And without care. Everyone's precious photo albums will go with them to the grave. We live in a time where the books and data we write are likely to vanish long before any previous period. We don't leave behind books, codexes, or scrolls, or stone tablets anymore.
Scholars will have more clue about life in 4th century via the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection than 21st century Terra Haute, Indiana.
> And without care. Everyone's precious photo albums will go with them to the grave.
If you're in the Apple ecosystem, please set up a recovery key so that your loved ones can access your photos and other things in case something unexpected should happen:
More generally: open Notepad (or whatever) and put the URL, username, and password for e-mail† account and bank/credit card accounts (and phone PIN), print it out, and put the paper in a sealed envelope and show its location (on top of fridge?) to a trusted friend/family.
† If someone can access your e-mail / SMS, they can probably reset any other account(s).
This needs to be published by everyone who has a blog and shared with friends and family everywhere.
I know first hand the mess from my friend who died of cancer at 38 leaving behind a wife and daughter with not only only accounts being locked out but a sprawling home lab that they did not understand. Even things like smart lights became a stumbling block when they could not control them. The router was a virtual machine on a rack mounted server in the basement. Had to unwind a lot.
>Even things like smart lights became a stumbling block when they could not control them. The router was a virtual machine on a rack mounted server in the basement. Had to unwind a lot.
A possibly unpopular opinion is that people should think long and hard about things like smart lights so that they can have cool mood lighting or whatever. I'm needing to have a lot of electrical redone because of a kitchen fire--microwave offed itself in the middle of the night, scary--and I told my electrician "no smart stuff." Which he was totally on-board with. I honestly think it's pretty much a gimmick for most people.
Or even free with a checking account. Depends on the branch. I think the right strategy is to store the high level passwords that do not change much and then an annual backup archive of all the family photos, tax returns, and most important documents on a hard drive in the box.
> A safe deposit box isn't expensive and can store a hard copy of your passwords and other personal information.
It may be necessary for other people to get 'authorized' to get access to it.
If you have access to one, it's certainly useful in case something happens to you residence, but one should also probably have access to something more convenient (especially in the case of incapacitance).
Although fewer bank branches have them and passwords change/get added. And anything that requires manual effort to update often won't get done. Heck, updating my tech info at home has been on my to-do list for at least a year.
Absolutely! Cell phone are a great example. Most people love taking pics, but rarely give much thought about storing them for the future. Why? It's kind of difficult, from the angle of categorizing the subject matter. Most of us on this website, I'm guessing, enjoy this sort of activity. But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage.
> But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage.
Most people tend to love going through their old photos, thinking of the people and places depicted, and sorting them. For an extremely long time this was entirely the norm and it took place mostly using large cumbersome physical books where meta data was recorded by hand by writing on the back of the photo.
It's become much easier now that files are digital, only slightly offset by the fact that digital has enabled us to take many more photos than in the past. What I see more often are people who have no idea when the photos on their phones are actually stored at all (what's a file system?), let alone how to copy them off their phone and onto something more appropriate besides resorting to something like emailing photos to themselves which has all the problems of adding and successfully transferring large file attachments.
It's a chore because companies really don't want people to have access to their own files unless it's on the company's terms and using their cloud servers.
I don't think that's true really. Yes most of the data recorded today will be lost but there is just so much being recorded that what remains is still much more than what we have of previous centuries. What we have of the 4th century is limited to a subset of what people specifically chose to write down. What will remain of this century includes that plus much more incidental information like the backdrop of a selfie that could turn out much more interesting to future historians than what you think is important now.
Scholars will have more clue about life in 4th century via the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection than 21st century Terra Haute, Indiana.