Digital Legacies

In the post DNS After Death an anecdote is present about a family member of mine that originally got me into computers. Time truly holds mercy for none of us and he passed on to whatever comes after this at the end of last month. He was always joking about how he was ready for what was next and I applaud his “Momento Mori” attitude. Here is the excerpt from that post:

“An anecdote that I can share is that I have a Great Grandfather who is currently 92 years old. He has a large sum of computational equipment and I believe that he was a great inspiration to myself in getting interested in computers. He has purchased video cameras since they were available and has recorded a myriad of family memories with them as well as a small collection of DSLR styled cameras and I believe he has 3 computers in his home office at my time of this writing. His wife or my Great Grandmother passed away leaving him a widow and it was at this moment that I started to ponder the implications of his passing as it isn’t a question of if so much as a question of when. This view depending on interpretation is “dark” or perhaps “removed” but the immediate thought of this being, I am the computer guy in the family and they are probably going to ask me for assistance on this. What would he want done with his records? Which ones would he want purged? What things should be cherished and where are they? What accounts currently exist in his name? What does he want done with them if anything? The ideas here being to honor my grandfather by honoring his wishes in the same way a will would be honored after his passing.”

It was arranged for me to go down to his home and collect belongings that I thought would be worthwhile. I had to make a second trip down there because my SUV was fully loaded after the first visit. Needless to say, my garage that was once clean is now less than organized. The current issue is the amount of data, the array of different mediums that data is stored on and the types of data that is present.

The data so far has the following classifications:

  • Sentimental homemade productions / memories
  • Commercial works ie theatrical movies / professional CDs
  • Software installation media

What is truly interesting to me is that it looks like so far, I may have duplicates across media. The tape reels were turned into Hi8 tapes which were then turned into VHS tapes and later DVD’s. The problem here is that I don’t know which works have gone through this process, how far along in the process they were, and which haven’t begun the process at all. It would be difficult to estimate the quantity of data that I am working with but if I had to guess it is around 1000 physical optical disks, ~100 VHS tapes, ~40 DV / Hi8 tapes and maybe 10 or so reels if film. What is uniquely admirable is that everything is nicely labeled for what it is with a date / title and 95% of the disks remain in jewel cases. Most of the media is accompanied by notes that I am still in the process of decoding. The bottleneck here is of course the fact that I am the bottleneck of moving disks to optical drives and separating his creations from that of other people.

That is a large inventory of equipment as it were, and I am still trying to sort the disks by the categorizations bullet pointed out above. That being no small task, it isn’t the end by any means. Two tower styled PC’s also made their way back home with me – One is a Mac Pro (Cheesegrater style) likely from ~2006 or so and a prebuilt tower PC that is an HP machine. The Mac Pro has 6tb of disk-based storage and the Windows machine has 1tb. 5 Hard drives also made the trip back, but they are older drives maybe yielding a total of 3tb across the lot of them. Despite the intuitive labeling on all the physical disks, it doesn’t appear that the easy road is my path of transit for these machines. I booted them on, and I didn’t find much that helped me in my quest of preserving or inventorying anything. Both machines are pretty barren which makes me believe that instead of keeping things live on the hard disk most of the data was burned to optical disk instead for long-term storage.

Currently my inventory of media that I have moved over to my hardware / storage is a paltry 5 movies that I ripped using handbrake. Certainly, other people in my family would like to enjoy the things that he created in iMovie and some of these have cuts that indicate that the tape was physically cut together in order to make the edits. Each piece of media that I have uncovered tells a story that I wouldn’t have learned of any other way. I can only imagine that it is a unique experience to watch a handheld video tape that was then cut and spliced of your father going to his Senior Prom in the 80’s. The thing about the findings I have made so far is that it has proven to me that I must go through all these disks and make sure that I leave no stone unturned, truly a blessing and a curse.

Thank you Grandpa for everything you taught me and all of the interest that sparked my drive for what I do professionally today. For the time that you loaned me use of your computer and helped me to play a computer game for what I remember to be the first time truly meant the world to me. The trips to Fry’s Electronics to purchase an MP3 player, going to the mall to buy my first CD, and letting me show you videos on this website called youtube. The spirit you had to create movies, take photos, and play music lives on in me today and therefore you are still here. The spirit that has somehow allowed me to have 3 computers in the room with me right now, just like you did. We live on forever in the memories and actions of others after all. Shame that I never showed you any of my video edits but hindsight is 4k. I will see to it that all of your best movies will be passed down on hopefully a total of less physical mediums than were given to me from generation to generation.

So, if you are looking for me for the next 6 – 12 months you know what I will be doing in my free time.

Long Live, ECK – February 6, 1926 – March 26, 2023


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