You can deal with this problem only if you are very disciplined about it, like GenX and prior generations were with their physical photo albums and paper financial records.
At some regular cadence (say weekly or monthly, whatever is your balance for loss tolerance vs discipline is), you will have to organize (tag) and archive your digital assets (photos, finance/health records etc), compress and encrypt it, and then do an offline disk backup as well as upload it to a cloud storage like S3. You will have to keep your encryption keys, S3 credentials etc safe and secure. And you will have to do it serious discipline, at the cadence you decided or at least upon completion of major life milestones, to save your digital life.
Then, every once in a while, at least once a year, you will have to download your entire archive, decrypt and decompress and verify that your system of tools and processes still work.
If you skip any of these steps, you are likely to find that you have screwed up and lost your digital life irrevocably.
Btw, just like your GenX parent/grandparents kept physical photo albums and file folders, you can keep digital equivalent in BD-Rs.
You should do this even if you use Dropbox or some other service provider. There’s still data loss potential. Google has lost entire Gmail accounts for example. The durability isn’t 100% after all… those extra .9’s aren’t to cover durability issues in the architecture, they’re to cover “oopsies” where the provider loses your stuff.
At some regular cadence (say weekly or monthly, whatever is your balance for loss tolerance vs discipline is), you will have to organize (tag) and archive your digital assets (photos, finance/health records etc), compress and encrypt it, and then do an offline disk backup as well as upload it to a cloud storage like S3. You will have to keep your encryption keys, S3 credentials etc safe and secure. And you will have to do it serious discipline, at the cadence you decided or at least upon completion of major life milestones, to save your digital life.
Then, every once in a while, at least once a year, you will have to download your entire archive, decrypt and decompress and verify that your system of tools and processes still work.
If you skip any of these steps, you are likely to find that you have screwed up and lost your digital life irrevocably.
Btw, just like your GenX parent/grandparents kept physical photo albums and file folders, you can keep digital equivalent in BD-Rs.