A digital expedition into owning and maintaining my own data!
Technology has flourished over recent history at the pace of Moore’s law. As humans this has been nearly impossible to keep up with. Even as an Electrical Engineer who has made my career with computers, I gave in about 15years ago and just rode the consumer wave of hardware/cloud/phone. I allowed 15 DVD’s worth of pictures, videos, and files to be created and distributed across device and space.
Any attempt made at taming the digital beast was met with new operating systems, new cloud services, and a wife and daughter who just see this sea of digital features no differently than the air we breathe. It is just there and works, why would it be otherwise. “What do you mean you don’t know where that picture from Spain is that we took, you know the one on the 3MegPixel easy shoot Kodak camera we use to have?!?!”
Losing what data I have corralled is obviously not an option. And being a technologist, I have no reasonable excuse for allowing such an event to occur. So being diligent I purchased a 2TB NAS and diligently backed up my files every holiday and stored the device in a safe place. Kudos to me! Yet still, technology bytes again. The home computer with everything on it dies, cool no problem, I planned for this. But wait all the PC’s I have access to are now windows 10, and guess what the BlackArmor backup software which was purchased by Seagate hasn’t been maintained since 2010, and oh what a surprise, their new all-encompassing solution does not appear to be compatible with the archives I’ve created. …… Even once solved, this story never ends.
This tirade does not even start to consider the security and privacy questions of my family’s data existing all over the cloud and across more devices then I can remember. Then there is the desire for other devices, security cameras, games and devices with cameras.
I conceptually know how to support, secure, isolate and solve any of the problems I’ve complained about above. But they all take a notable effort. And how helpless the non-nerd types of this world must feel!
Of course, there are many cloud solutions that solve much of this for us. And, for many, this is a perfectly acceptable solution. Without getting into a long review of the pros & cons in this discussion, for me this is a version of the dependency I’m attempting to avoid.
This project will document my process for slaying the digital beast to create a reliable maintainable digital solution for my home. The intent of this effort is to own and protect me and my family’s digital life.