What to do with old home videos of a parent who has died

Somewhere there's a box. VHS tapes, maybe Hi8 or MiniDV, maybe a stack of DVDs someone burned in 2006, maybe a hard drive nobody has plugged in for years. On them is the only footage you will ever have of your mother laughing, your father telling the story about the boat, the two of them at a table you've long since given away.

Those tapes are dying. Magnetic tape loses its signal over decades, and the players to read it are getting rarer every year. This is not a reason to panic; it's a reason to do the dull thing this month instead of next year.

Step one: get them off the tape

If you have the player. Plug it into a cheap USB capture device (they cost about the price of a takeaway) and record the tape playing into a laptop. It's slow — real time — but it works, and you can do it in the background on a Sunday.

If you don't. Every town has a service that digitises old media; big pharmacies and photo shops often offer it too, and there are mail-in services. Expect to pay per tape. Ask for the files back as MP4, and ask for the original tapes back as well — don't let anyone keep them.

If it's DVDs. Most laptops no longer have a drive, but a USB DVD drive is cheap, and free software will rip the disc to a file. Do it now; burned DVDs from that era are failing faster than tapes.

If it's an old hard drive or SD card. Plug it in before you do anything else. If it doesn't mount, stop and take it to a recovery service — don't keep trying.

Step two: don't watch it all yet

You don't have to. Some people need to see the footage immediately; some can't for a year. The point of this step is to rescue, not to relive. If a tape is labelled "Christmas 1998," you can digitise it without pressing play.

If you do watch, maybe not alone the first time.

Step three: two copies, and a name

Put the files in two places: a cloud folder (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox) and a hard drive you keep somewhere else — or send a copy to a sibling. Name the folder for the person and the year, not "VIDEO_TS_copy_2." In ten years you want to be able to find "Dad — 1996 — Lake."

If other people in the family would want them, share the folder now, while you remember to.

Step four: pull out the voice

This is the part people don't think of, and it's the part that matters most for AIGriefBot and for anything else you might ever do with their voice.

Buried in those hours of footage are usually a few minutes of the person talking clearly: telling a story at the table, narrating the camera, reading a card. That audio is far more useful than you'd expect. It's what lets a companion speak in a voice modelled on theirs; it's also what you'll want on their birthday, or to play for a grandchild.

Scrub through and note the timestamps where they talk for 30 seconds or more without much noise. Free tools (any video editor, or the built-in ones on a phone) can trim those into short clips. Save them separately, labelled: "Mom talking — 1999 — kitchen."

What you can do with it after

• Just keep it. Most people. It's enough.
• Make a short cut for the funeral, the anniversary, the family — five minutes of them being themselves.
• Share the clips with the people who will never otherwise hear that voice: the kids, the grandchildren, the friend who moved away.
• Build a companion. AIGriefBot uses one clear recording to let every reply be spoken in a voice modelled on theirs, and the stories on the tapes are exactly the memories it's shaped from. It's always clearly a recreation, it isn't for everyone, and it's free to try.

Whatever you do with them, the first step is the same. Find the box. Get the files off the tape. Then decide.

practicalvoice