I write a brief journal entry each day. Would have loved to read the day-to-day musings of past generations in my family, so I’d like to do this now for posterity. I even designed a custom printable planner with space for it, Letter/A4 sized so I can easily scan them in once I’m done. It’s just a section of my planner so the context of what I did that day is right there and the limited space keeps me from feeling pressured to write in gory detail. Printed out because the digital equivalents never really worked well for me.

That only captures a small amount of my life and I’m not big on taking photos, but even a brief daily journal entry takes much discipline, so I won’t push it and risk giving up.

While I like to consume documents and photos on paper, I don’t trust it in the long run. Vulnerable to water, fire, UV, and theft. You could say the same for electronic media, but it’s easy to duplicate, encrypt, and verify with checksums (or replace if it fails). All of my photos and documents to date fit within 128gb with room to spare, so I store encrypted copies on hard drives at home, a SSD hidden among cables and chargers at work, on my personal laptop, and in a microSD in my wallet. All verified with btrfs scrub and synced at my leisure.

Bought an automatic-feed scanner to gradually digitize the hoard of paper documents and photos I have remaining. I ought to look into digitizing old home VHS tapes from my childhood and backing up the really important stuff to M-Discs sometime, but that’s all I have time for now.