10 ms·
Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
By "Family Data Warehouse" I refer to all the info and documents that one tracks over the years, perhaps for one's self, but then also potentially for spouses, kids, parents, siblings, relatives, etc.
Some common categories:
(1) Financial: account statements (pdf, paper, etc), transaction CSV/ofx/etc, insurance policies, financial institution correspondence (confirmations, T&Cs, etc), tax forms, deeds/titles, loans, debts, contemporaneous records, paystubs, employment letters, receipts, etc
(2) Health: test results, diagnoses, medications used, doctor info/correspondence, vaccinations, hospital interactions, statements, bills, etc
(3) Product and services info: products purchased, maintenance info, warranties, replacement parts, recall notices, class action events, professional used (CPAs, lawyers, contractors, plumbers, etc), etc
(4) Personal legal and other documents: wills, trusts, health directives, pre-nups, legal settlements, personal contracts, rental agreements, government IDs, immigration/naturalization docs, law enforcement interactions, etc
(5) Memories and other info of sentimental or other value: pictures, videos, cards, recordings, music, diaries, clippings, personal notes, etc
For many of these one might ask the usual questions:
A. do I have a reason/obligation to retain it? for example, tax authorities often require certain classes of record keeping. sometimes commercial entities make false claims in retrospect that you can only rebut with evidence (even major banks!). some documents can end up only being used by heirs at end-of-life (ex: basis information for assets like a home, which can require proof of improvements over the years, depreciation claimed if the home was ever rented, etc)
B. is there a downside to retaining it? clutter, hard/costly to move, identity/other theft risk, physical decay over time (ex: obsolete storage formats (VHS, mini-DV, blueray)), etc
C. will I (or the appropriate person) be able to find it when I need it? physical paper vs electronic mgmt, indexing, filing, passwords, legacy services for transferring access.
D. can I actually retain it? backups, water damage, fire, theft, physical safe management, etc some online services don't provide any/easy export of data, many have inconsistent retention policies (ex utility companies)
Some of the categories above have specialized software and services dedicated to them (ex: photos services, quickbooks, etc) while some are more ad hoc (goog drive, dropbox, local HDD); even specialized services often fall short on key matters (quickbooks doesn't track statements afaik); many specialized systems have various platform limitations (no turbotax on linux, say); many vendors try to play various lock-in tricks; some vendors go out of business or discontinue products over the years; some institutions are very paper oriented so one perhaps scans or tries to limit paper delivery; some services place data in the cloud creating security exposure; etc etc
- paltman 3y agoI use https://www.trustworthy.com/ https://www.trustworthy.com/ and Dropbox and am very happy with this combination.
- bitmover 3y ago+1 for Trustworthy, it’s a really fantastic product. The app is well designed, constantly improving and the founders really seem to understand the problem they are solving.
- coderatlarge 3y agothanks for sharing Trustworthy - I'll check it out. if you're willing to share: do you worry about their security or do you feel that they're at least as secure as what you could do yourself or other services might do?
- mikewarot 3y agoSafe deposit box at the bank for the physical records. A labeled manila envelope stored locally for each of us with the typical "identity" documents, SSN card, birth certificate, etc. Everything is stored locally, unencrypted, and backed up on a local removable HDD, and on BackBlaze. BackBlaze has saved my bacon more than once. As for physical objects, they're all temporarily mine, until I pass on. They're either tools, consumables, or tied to personal memories. Everything else can go. The one significant thing to pass on to others is all the data in D:\source\yyyy\yyyymmdd*, which is all of my photos, including family events, short videos, etc. As best I can, all the faces have be tagged with XMP metadata. (Nobody wants to keep an old box of photos without knowing how those people are related) Total Files Listed: 392934 File(s) 725,479,895,968 bytes 16103 Dir(s) 1,790,571,331,584 bytes free D:\Source> I need to discuss with my spouse and child what they want from there.
- raggles 3y agoWhat do you use for face tagging? It's a tedious task, I used to use Picasa but it wasn't XMP and it's deprecated now