The work of lesbian archives is a labour of love and a memory work dedicated to the preservation of traces of lesbian lives. This paper looks at the ethics and politics of archiving lesbian video productions and home movies.  The situation is urgent: the videos and films are decaying and therefore in need of immediate restoration. Digitisation is increasingly being used to preserve the film footage. Digitisation, however, also offers the possibility of widely disseminating the films, for example online, either on the archives' own websites or via video sharing websites, such as YouTube or Vimeo. Yet, what happens if personal memories enter the (heteronormative) public sphere? What are the ethics of making lesbian heritage accessible?  Drawing on the works of the Lesbian Home Movie Projekt in Maine and of bildwechsel in Hamburg, a feminist archive for women visual artists, this paper outlines two different archival strategies of preserving lesbian audiovisual heritage.