Saving Your Photos

When you were going through those boxes of memories from your grandparents and great-grandparents did you find out something interesting about a family member that you did not know before?  Did you have a famous relative that you didn’t know existed?  You never know what kind of information that you will find when going through old family photos and mementos.

Don’t gamble with those memories, you need to find a way to preserve them for future generations.  I know everyone always talks about this as something they “need” to do, or “want” to do, but actually many people just don’t take the time to get started on that project.  It looks so daunting when you first look at those boxes of pictures.  How to get started, when to get started, and what am I going to do with all this “stuff” once I have actually started on the project.

You can digitize those memories and store them on your computer hard drive, but will that hard drive still be around in 5 years or even 10 years down the road?  We don’t really know the answer to that question, but technology is changing every year.  According to Ethan Miller, the Symantec presidential chair in storage and security at the University of California, Santa Cruz, newer hard drives are less susceptible to heat and other environmental factors.  You can store items on an external hard drive but you need to check it out occasionally to make sure that it is still working.  (Just like your car, it needs to be started once in a while so the battery doesn’t die!)

Another option for storing digitized photos is to put them on a CD/DVD, but I personally feel that also storing them in the cloud is a good way to preserve those memories.  We should always have multiple copies of our digital photos.  Suggested that we have at least three places where you have stored photos in case of natural disasters or just plain loss.  One copy on your computer/EHD; one copy on a DVD/CD that you give to a trusted family member; and a third copy in your bank box or some other safe place that you prefer.

There are other options for you to store photos online, including Dropbox, Google Drive and Flickr.  While disk drives and computer cables might change, it’s a good bet that the internet will be around in 50 years.

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