Dean Drako believes everyone has stories worth preserving.
That’s why the serial Austin entrepreneur started the Permanent Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit group endeavoring to make it possible for everyone to leave a digital legacy.
“Kind of what instigated this for me was I was on the (U.S. Patent and Trademark) website. I had pulled up some patents from Thomas Edison. Then I thought, let’s look at my patents. I realized that this could be the only place 100 years from now where my name would appear on the internet. And why was that? That was because this was maintained by the federal government, and it was a place where documents were kept for significant periods of time. And I’m like, well that’s kind of sad. My life has a lot more meaning than those patents.”
For the record, he has 27 of them.
Drako said he was constantly backing up photos of his children, trusts, wills and other documents — what people used to keep in safety deposit boxes “but now it’s all electronic. The formats would occasionally change, and I’d have a document from 10 years ago and couldn’t open it anymore.
“This is really silly,” Drako thought. “What happens to all of this stuff — it’s beautifully organized on my computer. What happens to it when I die? No one’s going to have my password. I can put it on a USB stick and give it to my kids. They’re going to take the USB stick and put in a drawer and years later, they’re going to pull it out and there’s not going to be a USB on their computer.”
Robert Friedman, executive director of the foundation, said Permanent is a “Cloud-based digital preservation system for everyone. That’s what we’ve built. The idea is a place where you can safely and securely preserve your personal, family, business memories and be confident that they’ll be available later.”
Instead of being subscription-based, Permanent operates on a one-time payment model, a pay-as-you-go system. The cost is $10 per gigabyte. Any type of file can be stored. There’s also opportunity to share files with selected family members and friends — or not.
Permanent is set up as an endowment and recently hit its public launch goal — $100,000, 1,000 registered users and 10 terabytes of storage claimed. The next goal is $2 million, 20,000 users and 100 terabytes of storage claimed. The long-range goal is $10 million, 100,000 users and a petabyte of storage claimed.
Permanent is based on the “same endowment model that supports the Smithsonian,” Drako said. “We want to be a place that someone can take materials — whether it’s a picture of 1,000 or a paper they wrote or a document, and cam make a one-time payment and that document is endowed and the Permanent Legacy Foundation will preserve it for eternity.”
Friedman said Permanent seeks to “preserve the things that create meaning in people’s lives.”
Users get a free gigabyte to start so they can experiment with the platform.
“A gigabyte seems to be a reasonable quantity of storage for people to add as they go along,” he said. Every $10 goes into an endowment fund, and Permanent will use 4% of the interest to pay for storage. “Financially, it’s a sound and reliable model. It’s not like a company that takes that $10 and it goes into their profits. It’s not a bullshit kind of story like that,” Drako said.
Think museum, but “the thing that is unique about our approach is we don’t have a physical footprint like a museum,” Friedman said. “The cost of a digital footprint decreases over time.”
Everything at Permanent is encrypted, Drako said. “We store the files in multiple formats,” he said. “When you upload into Permanent, we convert it into a PDF format and other formats to guarantee we can archive it and preserve it properly. We store the files in multiple locations across the globe, all encrypted and secured.”
Users can specify what happens to documents after they’re gone so there is clear ownership and ability to transfer ownership.
Permanent is for everyone, “no matter what your stature is in life,” Friedman said. “Our goal is to create a new kind of history, one that is representative of all people.”
