Damn, UP nearly killed me! I mean, he loses Elli (yes, i know that name and it made it hit doubly hard) AND the dog?

(Also, there seems to be an updog joke hidden somewhere in here, but I can't seem to find it.)

Yeah man, all the time, and for the stupidest shit. Everything from children's series to grown-up movies. My wife sometimes side-eyes me for it, but she's not much better herself and usually, when one of us cries the other one joins in. It's become a cute thing between us to catch or make the other one do it first, and I love it. Also, it's a way to teach my little son that it's OK to cry and not a matter of shame. Yes, ugly cry as well. Yes, also in front of others.

For reference I’m a 39 year old dude, not that it matters.

EDIT because I saw it in the thread: Lyrics! I have songs that I can't listen to while driving, because I can't drive while I ugly cry because that wouldn't be safe.

One thing that especially hits me are acts of selflessness, be it in fiction or the actual real world. We have semi-regular floods on the river meat where I live, and I usually try to volunteer to help out with sand barriers. And everytime just seeing all those people coming together in their free time, getting wet and dirty and sweaty and exhausted, not expecting a single thing, just because it's the right thing to do and because apparently we look after one another in this 600k people city... Just typing it out makes me tear up again.

Yeah, they're clearly picking a fight, aren't they? *cracks knuckles*

Also, fried bacon!

I like what the Hitchhiker's Guide proposed: have their clothes make one step to the left. Or, even better for some people (esp. men): do it with their makeup. Perhaps fake teeth/hair.

Also, why manipulate the mug they're drinking out of when you can manipulate the fluid inside of it?

You could tie their shoe strings mid walk... Constantly switch the key caps on their keyboard around (you just know they have to look down while typing)...

Auch nein.

We would domesticate large carnivores in no time by just providing food and back scritches.

Damn those are fine reasons to be proud! We all despise ourselves, I sure know I do, because we see the inside of our heads. But we also have to look beyond that. You seem like a good person; I hope you get through your struggles soon.

• I very literally survived the baby years of my son without killing myself or him, and now I'm still here. And that also means that I get to see the cool little boy that he's become, and that I get to tell me I helped make due to my efforts.
• I learned to whistle with fingers in mouth, which makes a) for a very loud whistle and b) me fell unreasonably proud and manly.
• I managed to buy a pretty run down house with my wife and we've rebuilt a huge part of it, so it can be a home for our family. I've leaned a shitton of things that I never thought I could do, and some that I never wanted to learn. And it have me a great excuse to buy all kinds of tools that I've always wanted but never needed. Like, I even own an old-timey scythe and 2 axes. \o/
• I was recently voted staff council member (which, yeah, k), and after that, several colleages, some of which I barely know, came up to me to tell me they were glass I made or, because they liked my style of working.
• I managed to raise a puppy without having him starve to death because I was an unresponsively piece of shit, and I was rewarded with my soul dog and just a very, very good girl in general.
• I was able to make some modernizing changes in IT at work, and that's even though I'm in public service, where things move with the swiftness of tar.
• I recently was able to set a border with someone on something I didn't want to do anymore. It was a small thing, but felt big for me.
• I recently passed my chainsaws license, so now I'm allowed to fell trees in public woods. Again, totally unreasonably proud and manly.
• I can back up my little trailer almost all the way into or long and narrow driveway. Not all the way yet, but someday.

Thank you for asking, that was actually a wonderful way to start my morning to early. :-D You can be proud for instilling that feeling in people, or at the very least in me.

What about you, @TehBamski, what else are you proud of?

See, as a German, when I see a country go down the same route as the Weimar Republic after handing over the power to the Nazi party, I think it's just very obvious. Hitler took some two months to completely destroy democracy, and the US are juuust in the middle of that. History doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes, and the similarities are just remarkable.

So yeah, I guess that would be a big fat trench in the sand.

This is my day job, so I'd like to weigh in.

First of all, there's a whole community of GLAM institutions involved in what is called Digital Preservation (try googling that specifically). Here in Germany, a lot of them have founded the Nestor Group (www.langzeitarchivierung.de) to further the case and share knowledge. Recently, Nestor had a discussion group on Personal Digital Archiving, addressing just your use case. They have set up a website at https://meindigitalesarchiv.de/ with the results. Nestor publishes mostly in German, but online translators are a thing, so I think you will be fine.

Some things that I want to address from your original post:

• Keep in mind that file formats, just like hardware and software, become obsolete over time. Think about a migration strategy for your files to a more recent format of your current format falls out of style and isn't as widely supported anymore. I assume your photos are JPGs, which are widely not considered safe for preservation, as they decay with subsequent encoding runs and use lossy compression. A suitable replacement might be PNG, though I wouldn't go ahead and convert my JPGs right away. For born digital photo material, uncompressed TIFF is the preferred format.
• Compression in general is considered a risk, because a damaged bit will potentially impact a larger block of compressed data. Saving a few bytes on your storage isn't worth listing your precious memories.
• Storage media have different retention times. It's true that magnetic tape storage has the best chances for survival, and it's what we use for long term cold storage, but it's prohibitively expensive for home use. Also, it's VERY slow on random access, because tape has to be rewound to the specific location of your file before reading. If you insist on using it, format your tapes using LTFS to eliminate the need for a storage management system like IBM Spectrum Protect. The next best choice of storage media are NAS grade HDDs, which will last you upwards of five years. Using redundancy and a self correcting file system like ZFS (compression & dedup OFF!) will increase your chances of survival. Keep you hands off optical storage media; they tend to decay after a year already according top studies on the subject. Flash storage isn't much greater either, avoid thumb drives at all cost. Quality SSD storage might last you a little longer. If you use ZFS or a comparable file system that provides snapshots, you can use that to implement immutability.
• Kudos for using Linux standard tooling; it will help other people understand your stack of anything happens to you. Digital Preservation is all about removing dependencies on specific formats, technologies and (importantly) people.
• Backup is not Digital Preservation, though I will admit that these two tend get mixed into one another in personal contexts. Backups save the state of a system at a specific point in time, DigiPres tries to preserve only data that isn't specific to a system and tends to change very little. Also, and that is important, DigiPres tries to save context along with the actual payload, so you might want to at least save some metadata along with your photos and store them all in a structure that is made for preservation. I recommend BagIt; there's a lot of existing tooling for creating it, it's self-contained, secured by strong checksums and it's an RFC.
• Keep complexity as low as possible!
• Last of all, good on you for doing SOMETHING. You don't have to be perfect to improve your posture, and you're on the right track, asking the right questions. Keep on going, you're doing great.

Come back at me if you have any further questions.

With a username like this, I'd give all my hosts and servers moon names. Like the moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto).