We live in a dark age. Not dark as in can't see a fuckin thing, but dark as in information. Information is always being, and has always been, lost. But now that most information is in digital form and mostly residing on other people's computers it's easier to lose than ever before. The other day I was looking at an old photo of some undisclosed location and thinking that if this photo was digital there's a high chance that it would have been lost decades ago. The plastic of floppy disks degrades and hard drives sieze up. Entropy always gets you in the end. There are things like archive.org, but preservation of digital information requires constant effort and expense.

It's always hard to know what the future wants. It's entirely possible, indeed likely, that the future wants nothing. But I think it's a good idea to err on the side of thinking that the future may need information from the past, or at least some parts of it. Knowledge is hard to obtain and easy to lose. Once good online services get enshitified and information pollution with slop content is an increasing problem. My observation is that typically information on websites last no more than three years, and then is gone or replaced. Anything beyond that is exceptional.

My current archiving policy is to backup onto a couple of hard drives (not SSDs, which don't retain data for long) and also annually to make some archival DVDs. Mostly I'm producing text and images, so a DVD capacity of 4Gb is typically enough to store a year's worth of output. In general, I don't make videos or anything very high bandwidth. My cameras are old and low resolution by today's standards (which I actually prefer since dealing with high resolution is just annoying). I am also thinking that I might get my photos printed once per year. Then in future if myself or anyone else wants anything from my past it should be available.

I don't have any offsite backup, but if the place burns to the ground or is pulverized by a hypersonic missile I will just take that as a sign from the gods that it's time to begin again from scratch.