I'm surprised that the author calls vinyl records "dangerous" (what does that mean, anyway?) and easy to destroy. That's just not true.
Vinyl, stored at a constant appropriate temperature, is an extremely stable medium. Records are subject to wear when they're used as intended, but it takes a lot of playings to destroy them if you've got decent equipment.
Make a high-quality transfer from LP to a digital medium is nontrivial, which is implied in a cutesy fashion without being stated explicitly.
After you try to do that yourself or hire a pro to do it, you've got a digital recording. Digital media are much less stable than vinyl! Seriously, if you're thinking about transferring music from an LP, it makes much more sense and is much cheaper to buy a commercial CD of the performance.
If you've got an LP that's so rare that it's worth transferring, talk to a record label about whether they are interested in doing a re-issue.
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All good points. Let me add two things:
if you are synchronizing data across the 3 recommended storage area (2 at home and one in the cloud), see what happens if one of them disappears, or pops up empty, because of a hardware or software glitch, or human error. Does the sync mechanism say "oh, everything has been deleted here - let me delete it everywhere." There are various ways to prevent this - make sure your system has one.
Also - think about how you are going to FIND anything specific in the future. You can name the files, or folders. Some software let's you add an additional ID, sometimes called a "tag." But using some unique feature of one piece of software can be a problem when (not if) that software goes away.
Good luck, everyone!
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I feel fortunate to have four small booklets from when my parents were POWs in Japanese Camps in WW2. They are in clean cardboard shoe boxes. Sometimes I use silk or cotton to help separate them or encase them. Since I am now 70 I must consider offering them to museums if interested.
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I had numerous albums with thousands of photos. Once I decided to digitize them it was amazing how easy it was to get rid of well over half of them to reduce the time needed to scan them: similar photos, too many photos of one event, old boyfriends, etc. Because many of them were faded and required correction using Photoshop or paint shop Pro, it became even easier to discard more because the process is time-consuming. Next step, make a book (blurb.com) and select only the really special ones for posterity. With the book format, you can add text about people and events so that your descendants will know who and what they are looking at.
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This article will be really helpful for people like me. My parents wrote letters to each other from their 20’s through their 70’s. Those letters talk about politics and social issues as well as their love for each other. I also have my mother’s lifetime of diaries. Add the articles they both wrote about their fields of interest and it’s a lot to archive. Much of it is too interesting to toss and I hope to pass it down to future generations. Thanks for the help.
Anything more along this line about family collections of written and other materials is most welcome! At the age of your average reader, I’m guessing many many people are trying to decide how to care for these fragile treasures.
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