A Shoebox Survives Neglect, A Drive Does Not

The most fragile part of most family archives is the part that feels the most modern and the most safe.

Paper is forgiving. Push a box of photographs to the back of a wardrobe, ignore it entirely for half a century, and it will very likely open with the contents readable. The failure mode is slow, visible and partial. Digital storage behaves in the opposite way. Drives fail without warning and without partial recovery, phones are lost, formats fall out of support, and the connector that plugs into the device gets replaced twice in a decade. The failure is sudden, total and silent, and nobody discovers it until they go looking, which is usually at the worst possible time.

Digital material therefore needs active management in a way that paper does not. Not complicated management, but deliberate management. Keep more than one copy. Keep at least one copy in a different building from the others, because a single house covers fire, theft and flood in one event. Check occasionally that the copies still open, rather than assuming that a device with a green light on it is doing its job. Note down where the copies are and how they are organised, in something a family member could read without you.

Anything that exists only on a phone is not archived, it is temporarily located. The same is true of anything that exists only in one account, only on one laptop, or only as an attachment in somebody's email. The test is simple and worth applying literally: if the device in your hand stopped working this afternoon, what would be gone forever? Whatever comes to mind is the list of things to copy out this week. Most people find the answer uncomfortably long, and most people find that copying the first and worst item takes about twenty minutes.