Memories that must outlive us — including the people who run this.

A family archive is a century-scale promise made by a young service. We take that mismatch seriously, and we resolve it the only honest way: by making sure no family's memories depend on our continued existence.

Every archive is exportable, in full, at any time, for free — originals included — in an open, documented format: plain JSON with named sections and a media manifest with SHA-256 checksums. The format specification is published for anyone to implement, and we ship a viewer that opens an export completely offline, with no server and no account. A family holding their export holds everything.

What we practice today

• Open export format, publicly specified, with integrity checksums — no dependence on us.
• An offline restore viewer, so an export remains readable even if dearestellie.org is gone.
• Originals preserved: derivatives (thumbnails, playback copies, transcripts) are additions, never replacements.
• Server data backed up on a fixed schedule with restoration actually rehearsed, not assumed.
• Nothing deleted as a side effect: memory edits keep prior revisions, and account erasure is an explicit, confirmed, audited act.

The format itself is documented on the open memory format page, and the offline viewer lives at /restore — try it with any export.

If DearestEllie itself ends

If DearestEllie were ever to cease operating, our commitment is a wind-down measured in months, not days: advance notice to every account, a one-click full export for every family, and the export format and restore viewer remaining freely available so those exports stay readable forever.

As the service matures we intend to strengthen this from commitment to mechanism — data escrow and library partnerships for cold copies are on our published roadmap. We will not claim those words until they are true; today the enforceable guarantee is the open format in every family's hands.