Backing it up: how to save your memories!

A little over two weeks ago, I got back some home videos that I sent to be digitized.  Wow!  What a trip down memory lane! The videos were all made between 1991 and 1996, so my adult children were pre-teens and teens and my niece, whose wedding featured in one of the videos, now has a daughter of roughly the same age she was then! There were some unexpected gems, like my graduation from community college and a party with friends, most of whom are sadly no longer with us. The company that did the digitization, Forever.com, far outstripped my expectations as to quality, even taking into account VHS technology from the '90s.  I've spent the last two weeks editing out the gems from the interminable footage of grade school programs and Christmas gift openings, and then sharing them with family and friends. They have produced some tears, a lot of laughs at fashions and hairstyles and a boat load of memories!

I've always felt that photographs are a kind of time capsule, a glimpse of how we were at a moment in time. I realize now that video is a different kind of time capsule-one that preserves voices and mannerisms, set in places that don't exist any more. They provide context for our photographs. Most of us today take both photos and video with our cell phones-I wonder if either will still be around in 30 years time! Backing up photographs is a chore to many people, or it's something they don't even think about until something happens to wipe those memories out. I know a lot of iPhone users who rely on Apple's iCloud syncing service to save their pictures, not realizing that deleting the pictures from their phone, also deletes them from the cloud! This is not a way to back up your precious pictures and videos! Facebook, Shutterfly, Google-all have the right to delete your images if you don't stay active!

I back up my cell phone pictures on my computer, like I do the photos taken with my "real cameras". Then I back them up again on an external hard drive. I back up clients' final pictures and important family pictures on my cloud drive as well. The thing is, if I were only taking pictures with my cell phone, I wonder if I would think to back things up that well?  We no longer have a packet of prints from the drug store to look at, so the digital image is all there is!

Forever.com, the company that digitized my videos, also provides permanent cloud storage for your photos and videos and a whole bunch of other services.  What makes Forever different is that you buy your storage space once and it's yours 'Forever'. They guarantee that, as industry standards change, they will move your images to the new format. And, if you are one of those that hate the back-up chore, you can set your phone to automatically back up your images to your Forever storage!  

One way or another, I hope you will back up your photo and video memories!    Hard drives are cheap, and easily available these days. And if you want to give Forever a try, click on my referral link and set up a free 2GB account.   Referral Link