Essays
Your software will not outlive your collection.
A mechanical watch bought today can reasonably be expected to work in 2090. No software written today will run then. Not this application, not any competitor, not the operating system either of them depends on.
That is not pessimism about any particular company. It is the ordinary lifespan of software measured against the ordinary lifespan of a watch, and the gap is roughly a factor of ten.
Which makes the record the fragile part
Collectors worry about the watch — servicing, storage, humidity. The watch is the durable object in this arrangement. The record is the fragile one, because it depends on something that will certainly stop working long before the object it describes.
Every collection record has an expiry date set by its format, and almost nobody knows what theirs is. A proprietary database file is readable for exactly as long as somebody maintains a reader for it. A cloud account is readable for as long as a company exists and chooses to serve you. Both are shorter than the watch.
The requirement this creates
Whatever a collection record is stored in, it must be able to leave — completely, in a form that needs nothing to open.
Not an export that produces a partial CSV with the photographs missing and the history flattened. A complete one: every field, every attachment, every dated event, in a format a person in 2060 can open with a text editor and understand without documentation.
That is a stronger test than it sounds, and most software fails it. The quickest way to find out is to run the export and read what comes out.
The paper argument
There is a case for printing, and it is not nostalgia. Paper has no dependency: no format, no reader, no company, no power. A printed document from 1950 is readable today by anyone who can read.
It is a poor working record — impossible to update, easy to lose, and a printed inventory of valuables is a security object in its own right. But as the final layer, held with the will rather than the watches, it is the only medium with a demonstrated century of performance.
Where the software fits — and where it does not
Watch Vault Archive produces documents that are self-contained files, openable on any computer with nothing installed and no connection, and exports the whole archive rather than a subset. What it cannot promise is its own longevity. It is software, subject to everything above, and the exports exist precisely because the application should not be the only way to read what you wrote.
One thing worth doing today
Export your record — whatever holds it — and open the result somewhere that is not the application that made it.
Whatever survives that trip is what you actually have. Everything else is borrowed against a company's continued existence.
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