Kenny G

When your 12-year-old life goal was Kenny G.

My dad recently found and digitized a bunch of old VHS tapes, which is where the cringey photo in this post came from.

Black and white still from a digitized VHS tape of a 12-year-old boy in sunglasses playing a saxophone in a living room, with video player controls showing 00:38 of 15:24.

More importantly, he unearthed something I had been trying to find for YEARS: our middle school production of Lord of the Flies.

My directorial debut.

Anyway, the whole thing reminded me how ridiculously easy it is for the stuff we create to disappear. Hard drives die. Platforms shut down. Accounts get locked. Links rot. Subscriptions lapse.

So over the years, I've accidentally developed a little system for making sure the things I care about are less likely to disappear.

For the stuff I'm okay sharing publicly:

  • Personal website: Hosted free on GitHub Pages. This is my central index for everything I create: writing, videos, podcasts, presentations, etc.
  • LinkedIn posts: Cross-posted to my personal site so LinkedIn isn't the only place they exist.
  • Videos: Hosted on YouTube, then linked from my site.
  • Presentations/documents: Stored in Google Drive, then linked from my site.

For the stuff I don't want public:

  • My dad set up a NAS at home.
  • A separate script syncs our photos and videos directly from iCloud to the server.
  • We use Immich to browse and manage that photo/video library.
  • Tailscale gives us secure remote access.

So we aren't relying entirely on iCloud, or any other single subscription service, to preserve everything.

The important part isn't using exactly these tools. It's this:

  1. Have one place that acts as the index.
  2. Don't let a social platform be the only copy of something you created.
  3. Keep important private files somewhere you control.
  4. Assume every service you use today might not exist 20 years from now.

Your future self may not care about most of what you save. But every once in a while, you'll find the middle school Lord of the Flies video you've been looking for for 20 years.

...or proof that, at age 12, my career plan was apparently: become Kenny G.

Save this post. Then go back up your stuff.