What a pity. I hope there is at least a small chance the suitcase was taken by accident so that your friend can recover his journal. Or, perhaps the journal is discarded where it can be used to find him.

I was big into photography and video for some time. But, I came to the realization that storage can become a problem. I don't want to take on the responsibility of managing multiple drives for backup. And, while cloud services do a better job than I would, I have to keep paying them to avoid losing things.

I maintain a Flickr account. And, I pay for iCloud. There is some redundancy.

For text, I agree with you that Hive is the best option. It is not in the hands of any one person to keep the blockchain alive. I'm not quite convinced that this works for other media. If a front-end folds, the media potentially goes too.

I think you are right to feel safe committing written memories to Hive.