One question that is often asked is how one preserved ones’ digital assets and pass them on to your heirs. We recently read about a new service that may offer a solution.
Longaccess promises to be a cold storage of sorts for your digital life. It's a cloud-based service that operates off Amazon's S3 data centres, but unlike other file lockers such as Dropbox or Google Drive, Longaccess aims to be less accessible, but more dependable. It describes itself as a ‘safe’ on the Internet, a location where one can store files fully encrypted and secured, safe and ready to be accessed for decades.
Longaccess is not a file syncing service, nor is it a file sharing service. It is a service for storing files for long periods of time. Files that are NOT updated, or changed at all. Every time a file is created and uploaded to a Longaccess Archive using the desktop application, one gets an Archive Certificate. This is a simple text file, that contains all the information required to access the data in the future:
- Anyone with access to the Archive Certificate can access the corresponding Archive data: Nothing else is required, not even a username or password.
- Access to the Archive data is impossible without the corresponding Archive Certificate. No one, not even the owner, nor Longaccess, can decrypt the Archive without the Archive Certificate.
One can think of the Archive Certificate as a full entitlement to access the data of a specific Archive. If one gives a copy to someone else, they can also access the data.
There are a number of questions re cost etc. that immediately spring to mind, including how they can guarantee they will be around in a decade or so, question which they try to answer on their web site.
Sounds interesting and may well be a way to preserve those ‘old’ photographs for posterity. One that may well be worth watching for a future opportunity.