The Archive.

Twenty-five years of photographs and video, and almost none of it was anywhere I could actually look at it. A cloud library I paid rent on every month. A Takeout export sitting in a folder, inert, a copy of my own life that no software would open properly. Copies on old laptops and copies of those copies — the same week in four places and a different week missing from all four. The whole point of a photograph is that you can find it again.

So I built the archive. One library, on disks I own, served by Immich from the always-on machine. Everything went in — roughly thirty-eight thousand files — and then got deduplicated against itself, because the exports overlapped enormously. What came out the other side was about twenty-five thousand photographs and ten and a half thousand videos in one index, with previews and thumbnails built out far enough that it is genuinely fast on a phone. That last part is not a detail. An archive you will not browse is a box in a loft.

Video was the hard part. Thousands of clips landed with no usable preview and no transcode, and the long ones — action-camera and drone footage, whole uncut runs — made the tail of that queue take days rather than hours. I let it grind. I also made a call I would make again: I stopped short of re-encoding everything to suit a laptop I never watch on. A correct thumbnail is enough to tell me what a clip is, and the phone is where I actually look.

Then I went looking for one specific lap and it was not there. A road trip, a circuit, a seventeen-minute run I knew existed. Nor were the toboggan runs from Switzerland. Nor most of the in-car footage — the vlogs, the conversations, the entire reason I did this. The photographs from those trips had all arrived; the big video files had quietly not. That is the failure mode that actually matters: an archive that looks complete and is not.

So I stopped trusting the copy and audited it. Checksums on both sides, the main drive against the older portable one, and the true gap came back as a list rather than a hunch. The footage had been on the portable drive the whole time. It was copied across and imported, and when a second missing lap turned up days later I ran the same audit again instead of guessing. The lesson holds beyond photographs: verify the copy, do not admire it.

After the first recovery I stopped babysitting it. When a copy finishes, the import now runs itself and the new footage appears without me. I would rather come home to it done than check on a progress bar from work.

A library still is not an archive until you can move through it. Two hundred and seventeen empty albums went first. Then the albums got rebuilt out of what the files themselves knew — year, then month, then place, then what shot it — so a trip is grouped as a trip rather than as the afternoon I happened to download it, and the camera footage sits apart from the phone footage. Faces I named myself. Anything the metadata could not place went into one album for me to decide on, because deleting is the one operation you cannot audit afterwards.

Then the drive fell off mid-write, and that taught me more than the build did. A machine that hibernates is a machine that drops its disk halfway through a transfer; the fixes were unglamorous — mains power, sleep and hibernate off, the lid doing nothing. The subtler failure came later. When the disk re-attaches, the service can keep answering perfectly healthy while every single image read fails underneath it against a mount that is no longer there. So the monitor I put on it does not ask the service whether it is alive. It asks it to read a real file. A liveness check that cannot fail is not a liveness check.

One copy on disks I own is not a backup. A second copy, kept away from this house, is the job I have not finished.