Organizing your digital stuff for the VERY long term

How do you organize your digital stuff so that it makes sense for not only yourself but to others, even if you are incapacitated or after you die? I am trying to solve this question for myself, finding it an incredibly interesting and challenging question whose answers would be useful to many others. I don't yet know the answers but I can tell you about a number of things that I think are related in some fundamental ways but whose connections.

I'm excited to work through the Nolo book Get It Together - Organize Your Estate Plan Documents. The book promises to teach us to "organize your records so your family won't have to." After looking through the table of contents, I'm impressed by the breadth of topics covered in the book.

Taking care of the varied types of digital documentation found on typical computers and online accounts is beyond the scope of the book. To jumpstart my study of digital estate planning, I just started studying Joe Kissell's book Take Control of Your Digital Legacy. I recommend watching an interview with Kissell as a accessible introduction to the challenges in digital estate planning. I wholeheartedly agree with Kissell's argument that organizing your digital estate is useful not only for those who come after you but also for the present day. It's much easier to do organizational work when the payoff is not so abstract.

I suspect that digital estate planning has some non-trivial overlap with emergency planning. If you have minutes to evacuate your house because of a fire or earthquake, how do you make sure that you can still access the most important pieces of information if you can't grab your computer? I've been assembling a USB key for my keychain: What should I store on it? how do I keep it up to date? How should I encrypt it? How do I make sure that those who need access to it can read it? The following articles hint at the relevant issues:

Maybe it's time for me to watch the videos from Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) 2017 | Stanford Libraries:

As the centrality of personal digital archives and the ubiquity of digital content grows, librarians, archivists, scholars, students, activists, and those who fill the role of the "family IT person," have to deal with how to best select, preserve, and manage digital material. PDA 2017 seeks to host a discussion across domains focusing on how to best manage personal digital material, be it at a large institution or in a home office.

If the videos prove useful for digital estate planning, I might make it a point to head to Houston in April 2018 for Personal Digital Archiving 2018 | University of Houston Libraries.

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