Comment by peterspath a day ago
Maybe it is better to de-tech a bit. Go back to some older decentralised stuff.
Like buy cd's and blu-rays instead of digital/drm locked/streaming service shit. Be an owner again instead of a renter.
> you learn that physical media has a limited shelf life.
Their point is that physical media itself has a limited lifespan.
You need to continuously "refresh" it every 1 to 10 years, depending on the physical media you choose, or it's most likely corrupted. I've lost many HDD, SSD, SD cards, and about 50 "archival quality" DVD/CD to time, with all manufacturers having somewhere around 3x to 20x exaggerated claim of longevity. I'm guessing their numbers are based on some temperature/humidity controlled marketing BS, rather than anything resembling reality.
SD Cards are the saddest. I've seen many older members of my family shed tears when they pull out their SD cars they carefully stored in a drawer/safe, and they're junk. Charge drift be a harsh mistress.
I don’t think you have to go that far backward. You can get a QNAP or Synology NAS, a storage VPS and use syncthing. I don’t even have the NAS yet, just a Pi with an external drive and I’ve gotten pretty far.
The part I haven’t been able to crack is syncing the Documents folder on my iPhone. All the syncthing apps for iOS are abysmal because there’s no real background sync. You can add a SMB share in the Files app, but that doesn’t get you offline access.