I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc).

I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to document the history of a community, too.

I would jump at the chance to do work in this space full-time. What little I have done, helping friends and with my own family, was fun and rewarding. I've never been able to figure out how to finance it.

The lab described in the article and others like it handle the digitization part, but there's still the the "forever problem" of kicking data down the road onto new storage technologies / services, too. The digitizing is the easier problem. Once the material is digitized I feel like it's in a lot more peril for catastrophic loss.

I think something like "digital cemeteries / memory gardens", financed by endowments that allow them to continue to operate in perpetuity, should be "a thing". I haven't thought deeply about how to make it work, but the "shallow" thinking I've done says it's financially unsustainable.

I lean toward not-for-profit because I'd like to provide the services for as close to free to the clients as possible. I think preserving family memories and records should be accessible to everyone-- not just those with significant financial means.

While I think what libraries do with these labs is laudable, I worry that the self-service aspect raises the bar too high for some people. I think having a service component, at a reasonable price, to do the digitizing and to work to preserve the material in perpetuity would be a great thing.

Find a local community church, public room, or public library and have them allow you to organize a handful of sessions where folks can bring in old devices and come up with a workflow that's efficient. Run it as a donation event where folks can donate money for a new hard drive , or to fund the service for other folks that can't afford it.

Set it up as a professional business (talk to funeral homes as adding it as a value service for well-to-do clients? Talk to estate lawyers?).

Once you’re making money then you expand your helping others for free or discounted.

You gotta make money somehow. Maybe have an optional durable+accessible storage and portal (just a SaaS and optional harddrive that you ship out or update on occasion... a miniPC that pulls from the SaaS using rsync automatically?).

You might be able to make this work if you sell enough of the SaaS subscriptions (12 bucks a month or 200 a year for perrenial backups -- ship us the device/etc. and we'll get the media into your account. You'd need 1000 customers with a 20% systems cost to do this full time, which seems reasonable).

There is a reason the Wordpress 100-year plan costs $38,000.