Why should the drives be sneakily deposited. If he trusts his relative or friend he may just tell them to keep it safe until new gets out.

However the bigger challenge would be to read the files using newer technology since those drive connectors might get obsolete. Maybe you need to store technology you can read it with. For example an external disk drive with USB 3 cables and Somme USB C adapters. If using internal drives this gets a bit complicated since you would need also some cables and motherboards. So external hard drives would be easier.

Maybe you could delete Reddit. But you can self-host your own lemmy instance in addition to you website. It does not hurt to have your own website in addition to social media.

However, you cannot host a lemmy on github pages.