This was my mother when she passed. She left me so many many boxes of cables and equipment. Sooooooooo many power supplies.

After a 2 ton truck worth of gear later I realised that I couldn’t do the same to my son. It would be criminal to leave him my garage worth of gear on top of his grandma’s.

I’m proud to say I’m down to two boxes (20 litre containers) worth of active day to day stuff (jugs cables, hdmi, usb, gpus and about 80TB of storage, probably more) .

And 1/3 of a garage filled with tapes and digital tapes (one day I’ll go through them. Ideally upload them to YouTube so people can see her work (she worked in film and television)

I recently digitized my family’s (and extended family) VHS and new to me 5.5 VHS camcorder tapes. Now I have my grandfather’s cassette tape collection of accordion recordings. Have yet to fiddle with losslessly digitizing those but I’m sure I’ll figure out out. My mom also has my other grandfather’s Super 8 camcorder she claims has their wedding video on it. Need to eventually get my hands on that and figure that out as well.

Scanning pictures however is the worst. You can use a 3rd party, but many of them dispose of your physicals after the fact and don’t guarantee the scans came through without error.

If you get anything digitized, sanity check the results, my mother in law got some done that were really weird, like some other family’s stuff and then it just cut out or something. I don’t think they put any effort into making sure it was correct. Especially if it’s somewhere disposing of the originals.