Back it up, Get it Back

When my oldest child, Reuban was born, I must have taken thousands of pictures of him. Of those thousands, hundreds were cherished, beloved memories. I'd look back at them all of the time. They were a wonderful way of seeing how far he'd come over the year.

I was just starting out in photography and had a love affair with the digital nature of my work. I had those photos of him saved on my computer and on my external hard drive. I only printed two or three of his newborn photos, one for my family, one for my parents and one for my husband's parents.

The day came for us to move to a larger house and when we got our computer set up, the file system for our precious memories wouldn't turn on. At the same time our external hard drive had reached that magical age when all electronics reach obsoletion. We tried our best to recover files from them but between the two we could only recover a fraction of a handful, some 50 images, mostly from the first two or three months of his life.

I have no photos of my precious boy learning to eat, to sit up, to crawl, to walk. I don't have pictures of his first birthday. I have two or three of him meeting his little sister for the first time. But so many of those memories are gone because I only had them backed up in digital form.

Digital is a wonderful, wonderful format. I'm so happy that we have digital as a way of preserving precious memories. We have all heard of the dangers of having only hardcopies of our photos; natural disasters, fires, theft, our prints are vulnerable.

But by the same token, digital format is vulnerable in much the same way. Here are jut a few ways that having only digital formats of your wonderful memories is dangerous:

Technology failure: Hard drives, external

hard drives and memory cards do fail.

Issues with hosting services: Hosting services

do go out of business. If you don’t make a

purchase on your account within a certain

time frame, your hosting service may delete

your photos.

Technological obsolescence: While we are able

to do more with our photos because of

technology, the fact that we have to constantly

re-record to keep current is difficult, not to

mention costly.

High tech is risky: When culling through your

possesions, printed photos will most likely be

kept; old jump drives are more likely to be

tossed by mistake.

The lesson here is this: back up your photos in multiple formats. Keep a thumb drive in your safe deposit box. File a burned DVD away with your important documents, print every special picture and keep them in a memory box. Print canvases and display them on your walls. When you change them up, pack them up safely and keep in in a cool, dark environment. The more formats you have your photos in, the greater the liklihood that your children and grandchildren will get to enjoy those memories, too.