I think you are severely underestimating the complexity of preserving digital data for 200+ years. It’s not trivial, but a family could totally put a box of notebooks and loose papers in a box in a dry/somewhat safe location and pretty much guarantee they will still be usable/viewable in 200+ years without any electricity/file format/solar flare/emp/etc/etc issues to have to consider.

I’m not disagreeing that it’s wonderful to be able to make multiple backups, offsite storage, etc of digital data, I’m just making sure you understand how difficult it is to keep digital data stored long term without significant attention to that desire.

Dropping some markdown in git is not a long-term (using 200 yrs as my example) plan.

I spent years and years working in a newspaper publisher trying to preserve the output digitally and it required serious investment (network storage, auto backup to LTO tapes, and verifying recovery is possible years later). It was and almost always is easier to ship two or three copies of the physical paper to separate storage facilities. I had to remind folks countless times that things like a dvd-r or cd-r have a maximal lifetime where we can trust that the data is retrievable.

Maybe long term storage of personal data will have some future breakthroughs that make it dead simple to trust they can be viewable in 200+ years but today that’s not the case.

I will say that most personal data (sans photos imo) isn’t useful after a few years (maybe 10+) and digital options are great for that. But for stuff we want to keep for centuries, it’s extremely hard and expensive today.

> I think you are severely underestimating the complexity of preserving digital data for 200+ years

although I doubt my personal notes will be necessary in 200+ years

Big same. It might be a curiosity to my kids (or grandkids if I have those) but I doubt anyone beyond that will care

Your personal notes are probably not significant in and of themselves, but historians will certainly care if no one's personal notes from today are preserved 200 years from now.

Most paper will not last 200 years in a normal climate. The acid treatment often used ensures it will break down in less than that. Sure if you actually have a dry climate and archival grade paper it can last thousands of years. However most of us don't have that.

However most of us don't need that either. There are very few things you care about. I threw my kindergarten art out long ago when I realized I wasn't interested in seeing how I improved (back then I thought it would be cool to look back and see). There are things I have done I will care about, but not too many.

I recently moved and was going through boxes of stuff I had accumulated. In one of the boxes, I have notebooks from over 20 years ago. There is also a hard drive with an IDE connection on it packed around the same time. The papers were ever so slightly degraded, but immediately completely readable. I no longer have the hardware to read the hard drive (though, yes, I’m sure I can find some online or at a garage sale). This box of materials has now gone through at least ten moves with me. My money is, generally, on physical media.

> git/cloud/external drive backups, you are unlikely to lose them

I can guarantee with total certainty that github & cloudprovider & your external drives will not exist in 200 years. Probably not even in 50.

If you want to leave anything at all (photos, documents) for your grandchildren to see, how would you do it?

> I can guarantee with total certainty that github & cloudprovider & your external drives will not exist in 200 years. Probably not even in 50.

tell me you don't know how doing backups work without telling me your don't know how doing backups work

Unfortunately you are underestimating the difficulty of making digital files available and readable in 200 years by several orders of magnitude.

A few backups isn't going to cut it. It's an immensely difficult problem.

How Gen A does it; cloud drive shared to your kids.

Right, which will go away as soon as cloudservice discontinues that feature or the company disappears. That is far from a long-term solution.

I don't disagree.

What is the alternative? Locking them up on a disk that can't be accessed cross-platform? Self-hosting doesn't solve the "if you're hit by the bus" problem unless the next generation of your family is well-versed in technology.

The alternative is in the title of this topic.

For things that you truly want to preserve for generations, have them printed out to good quality paper.

I’m trying to imagine a future where historians pour over modern day Leonardo’s markdown files.