Your Disintegrating Digital Past

photos would be a particular problem if I ever felt the need to look for them - I have no kids but yes, one day my loved ones will no longer be here and I will want to see photos and this will cause me pain - because in the past I copied them off the SD card mainly to free up card space. So I just have a bunch of "photos" folders in different places with different incomplete overlapping vintages of unweeded mostly-junk photos, and some eras have probably just... disappeared. Now I don't really need the space either so don't copy them often and I'm sure that will be bad in its way too.

then there are the blogs and email accounts which seemed like they'd be around forever and I never consciously decided not to log in again, I just didn't, and they probably disappeared at least a decade ago

given the chaos of photos and nth-generation copies buried many poorly-named folders deep, I'd love to agree with rushomancy

i'm glad to be a digital hoarder but mostly because it's what saves me from being an analog hoarder

but tbh my physical space is just as haphazardly piled high with ancient junk mixed with forgotten treasures and trashy nostalgia bombs and I'm just as terrible at organising or getting rid of physical stuff - perhaps you're right that it would be a lot worse without the digital hoarding, though, but that's too scary to contemplate

yep to all of that re how haphazardly my stuff has been thrown from place to place, nested lumps of pics within folders by month and place and drive and device

hate to say it but google photos has been a bit of use to me in starting to build one useful archive of it all tbh

the details of my life are quite inconsequential

I keep lists of all my favorite artists so if my HD screws up I can search all the stuff again. Not perfect but that is the measures I'm comfortable with.

my film polls stills are wrecked bc of photobucket, which i won't be paying for.

ILX's Top 100 Films of the 2000s, screencaps version

hate to say it but google photos has been a bit of use to me in starting to build one useful archive of it all tbh

Done this myself. Pretty handy.

I had a sudden memory the other day of being in a place in a European city. Could not for the life of me work out where it might have been. It was a time when I had a very basic camera phone and took perhaps a handful of photos the whole time. I've tried streetview and doing a CSI on the one picture I took of a funnily-named cafe but I don't even know if that was the same city I'm thinking of.
These days I'd have way more of a digital record I could check against. I'm more distraught that whole chunks of my memory are disintegrating tho. Anyone else get a very random, vivid, long-forgotten memory pop into their head as you're falling asleep?

I still have my emails from 1997 or so onwards.