Backing up your memories

Record keeping is getting more and more digital. These days, most of our important documents and records reside on a computer somewhere. For those of us with some computer skills, that is not a bad thing.  When we began to go through the stuff in our basement, we found boxes and boxes of old papers that had to be shredded.  Traditionally, we have been told to keep financial records for seven years, in case the IRS should audit us. In practice, today, the IRS knows exactly what we earned and how much tax we paid. Once we confirmed that with our electronic tax return this year, we got our refund in a week! 

Digitization has allowed us to cut the paper clutter.  When we went to New Zealand, all our travel documents were delivered digitally in the form of an app. It worked brilliantly, ensuring that we never misplaced receipts and reservations, and had all our information at our fingertips on that multi-purpose device of choice: the smart phone. 

Our phones serve a lot of purposes besides making calls. They serve as message boards, calendars, timers, alarm clocks, flashlights and measuring devices. For many people, their phone is the only camera they use to take those important photographs of life's milestone moments! So what happens when that phone is lost or destroyed?  Do you back up your electronic information?

When it comes to the pictures on my cell phone, I back them up to my computer. There are always a lot of pictures that have no future value, pictures I took to share in a text or on Facebook. For example, going through the basement, I take pictures of items we find to ask the family if they want them. I may not remember to delete them from my phone, which is currently storing 2,617 photos. For the pictures that I want to keep, I back them up to my Forever account. Apart from the permanence of owned versus rented cloud storage, I can find individual pictures much more easily by date or tag!  If you have you ever scrolled and scrolled through your phone looking for a particular picture from several years ago, you will see the benefits! 

 March 31st is World Backup Day, reminding us to back up our documents, pictures and files at least once a year. So much is stored on our home computers-what would you lose if your computer crashed or was hacked, or a wildfire, hurricane or tornado damaged your home?  It makes sense to have your important documents and priceless photographs in more than one place. Today, cloud storage allows us to access our files from anywhere in the world and Forever guarantees that the storage you own will be accessible to generations to come!