Creating a personal or family archive

We'll begin by reviewing available products out there that can assist in creating and managing our custom personal or family archive.

There is no better place to start than with Permanent.org, a digital preservation platform.

We know about cloud storage by the brand-names:  Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, One-Drive and more. These are services that typically charge a monthly or annual price to give you gigabytes and terabytes of extra space for all your digital things, including photos and videos.

Permanent.org is similar to those services in a certain regard. It's also a cloud-based repository for your files.

But there's a key difference. You pay for storage space on Permanent just one-time. You can always add and pay for more storage space to Permanent, but you never have to pay again for the space you've already bought and filled with your files.

What's more, your account with Permanent.org is structured to outlive you. A sequence for passing ownership to your designated contact is enacted, when your time comes.

It's perpetual storage, not unlike a cemetery plot in model:  An upfront cost that goes into an endowment, which can bear the cost to maintain the grounds going forward.

Now, granted, forever is a mighty-long time, as the man said. And we can't know all the hazards of the future.

But, qualifiers aside, Permanent.org may be a great space to store treasured family documents.

• You don't have to worry about account deletions due to an expired credit card or other account-related mishap.
• You don't push the cost of a cloud subscription onto your next of kin.
• You can share access to your files with specific people, and can even create limited spaces for public access.

And if you should pass away, even suddenly, Permanent is configured to grant your designated contact ownership of the account.

As you might expect, your one-time cost for storage at Permanent.org is going to differ substantially from Google Drive and Dropbox. For this reason, it's a good idea to think of Permanent as a storage home for family photos, videos and other important files that should be moved along to the next generation.

If you're at all like me, you have tens of thousands of files on your computer and on cloud storage that never really need to be opened again -  duplicate files and needless other documents. There is no value in pushing all that clutter into our Permanent.org repository.

There is always a need for the large storage capacities and syncing that we pay for with subscriptions such as Google Drive, iCloud or Dropbox. And we'll talk more about the use of those services, later.

By carefully curating what goes into Permanent.org, we'll be able to keep costs low ($10 for 1 GB of space) and grow the account as we go.

As of today, I have 4 GB, or just $40 worth of permanent space on permanent.org. That won't be enough for all the photos and videos I expect to add later, but I'll buy more space as needed.

With a structure designed specifically for permanence, Permanent.org stands as a great potential landing place for the curated "best stuff", the things that are most likely to be highly-valued by our kids and beyond.