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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Chronicle of Life Foundation?

Chronicle of Life Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a mission to save personal memories forever. The Foundation was incorporated in 2008. For more information, please read our About page.

How are you different from Facebook or other sites that allow me to save stories and photos?

Chronicle of Life Foundation has a unique focus on long-term preservation of personal data, including life stories, photos and other files. We don't offer instant status updates or networks of friends. Instead, we have created the only Trustworthy Digital Repository for personal data, and we are the only organization to guarantee your data forever.

Why should I use your service?

Have you ever forgotten something that you wish you remembered, or lost a photo or other document that you tried to save? Paper gets lost or destroyed, while hard drives and DVDs have a limited life, and file formats change every few years. Other websites promise to store your data for free, but do not have the resources to preserve them long-term. Chronicle of Life offers a permanent solution, for your own benefit and the benefit of others. For more information, please visit our benefits page.

Is my data secure?

All your information is secure in more than one sense: Firstly, it is protected from data loss due to our development of a Trustworthy Digital Repository. Secondly, it is protected from curious eyes by offering you a range of privacy choices for each content item. Finally, it is protected from unauthorized access by a range of security features.

What should I write about?

Everyone's life is unique and of interest to someone. You can share your life experience, keep a daily journal (add a story to record three things you did today), capture the life of a loved one in text and photos (add a person and photos and videos) or record important periods or events in your life (add a longer story and attach photos). For more information, please read our writing tips.

How can you guarantee to preserve my data forever?

We have created a trustworthy digital repository for personal data. As such, we made sure that the organizational, technical and financial infrastructure is in place to preserve your data forever. For more information, please visit our Trustworthy Digital Repository page.

Why should I pay for "forever"?

Even if you want to preserve your information just over your lifetime, saving it forever is an added bonus at a negligible cost: if it costs $0.19 to preserve 1 MB of data for 60 years, it only costs $0.20 to keep the same data forever (see calculation details).

Paying an extra $0.01 per MB thus ensures that your valuable memories are preserved not only over your lifetime, but forever.

Why don't you guarantee other file formats, such as Microsoft Word?

Consistent with best practices for a trustworthy digital repository, we guarantee and migrate file formats that are widely-used, non-proprietary and open source. Many file formats are proprietary, such as Microsoft Word and Excel, which makes future migration to new file formats dependent on permission by Microsoft, and may be illegal without such permission. Furthermore, it would be cost-prohibitive to offer file format migration for all files, given the huge number of file formats.

However, you can still upload any file you like to your account even if the format is not on our list of approved file formats. We will preserve the file as is forever, without attempting to migrate it to a new file format.