How Can I Hang On To My Digital Life?

I've been watching the "available storage" bars on my various digital storage systems creep up over the last couple years with a growing sense of dread. Each percentage point is a tick closer to an upgrade to my package—money I'll have to pay Apple, Google, and Dropbox to continue to store my digital life. Maybe more importantly, I'm aware of just how much stuff I produce every day, and as the mess grows, I wonder if I should do something about it. On worse days, I think maybe I should just succumb to the digital hoarder house I've built for myself. It is probably my obsession with my own death, paired with the ever-present anxiety about whether the way I spend my days truly matters at all, that has led to an interest in personal archiving practices. My life's work amounts to several terabytes' worth of mp3s, wavs, text files, and jpegs that live on server space I pay to lease somewhere in the world. I like the idea of my work being accessible after I'm gone, and for a long time I trusted the infrastructure of the internet to do that archival work for me. But if the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that only dummies blindly trust big tech to operate in their best interest.

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