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.

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) 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” (TVDB). These ideas fascinated me.

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.

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.

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…