I’m talking like photos of important moments of your life, and perhaps deceased loved ones or deceased pets. Maybe favorite TV, Movies, Youtube videos, stuff that might be lost when you get released. Let’s say like 1-5 terabytes worth of stuff.
Hard Drives at home wouldn’t be an option, since they’d get confiscated. If you bury a hard drive in the woods, it could get corroded.
I was thinking foreign cloud, but then you wouldn’t be able to keep paying the subscription since they’d probably try to seize your assets.
“Lifetime” cloud plans are kinds shady, I’m not sure if I could trust them.
So… what are the options? (Hypothetically)
And yes, budget is a huge factor. A person facing persecution would not have billions to create a dedicated building to store an archive.
Context plays a huge factor here. Depends a lot on which country you’re being prosecuted, how much effort is people putting in catching you and gathering your evidence, and what kind of resources you can count with.
Personally, I’m not too tech savvy so I’d take the bury it in the woods option even if you say it can get corroded. There’s many things that can happen to it, depending on the weather, environmental policies (cross your fingers they won’t be selling the land for development while you’re away), and what you can afford to store your drives in. I believe it’s possible to protect the cache well enough if you ziplock them carefully and then find a Tupperware container, perhaps put that inside a larger wooden box or a tin to protect against crushing you should be good. Hell you can even cover the Tupperware containers in cement so it would look like you are burying rocks. But, do you have access to these things? Do you have the time?
Another option is to hide the cache similarly protected in some architectural nook you know of, perhaps at a friend or relative’s house- some places have space under houses. Or perhaps you know how to crawl in some wall space or similar. The challenge here is returning to it, because the landlord (your friend) may be gone, dead or else by the time you’re out. The property may be bulldozed and sold, who knows.
Why should the drives be sneakily deposited. If he trusts his relative or friend he may just tell them to keep it safe until new gets out.
However the bigger challenge would be to read the files using newer technology since those drive connectors might get obsolete. Maybe you need to store technology you can read it with. For example an external disk drive with USB 3 cables and Somme USB C adapters. If using internal drives this gets a bit complicated since you would need also some cables and motherboards. So external hard drives would be easier.
Even if they’re obsolete there will almost certainly be some way to retrieve your data unless you’re expecting to go away for a LONG time- if you went away in the 90s and did this I’m pretty sure it’d be as simple as buying a SATA-IDE adapter.
I mean, you can buy adapters for everything. No reason to expect that would change in the future.
They don’t necessarily need to be deposited sneakily, although that’s to be considered, especially if you have people interrogating and investigating your friends and family - maybe you know someone who would crack easily under pressure but has the perfect hiding spot for you.