Will Your Child's Baby Records Still Be Readable in 50 Years?

Audience
Parents using digital parenting-record apps or services
Target length
~1,500 words
Status
Draft v2 (translated from Japanese v1)
Original
../126_data_longevity_50years.md

Lead

When your child turns 50, will the records you're keeping right now be readable?

Fifty years is a time scale that's hard to imagine when you're deep in the infant months. But if the intended recipient of these records is your child herself — the person who will grow up, have children of her own, outlive you, and eventually reach old age — then that full arc of time is the delivery window. Whether photos, videos, and text survive to reach her is a technical question, but it connects directly to why you're recording in the first place.

There is a body of research in information science and digital preservation that has been accumulating these answers for decades. What it says, applied to a box of baby photos and a cloud-backed parenting app, is worth knowing.