Michael P. O'Connor

Well three things have happened as of late that made me think about how we keep our pictures today. I was in the past the only way to lose your memories (pictures) was to a disaster such as a flood or a fire. Now we don’t only have that to worry about, but we have hackers to worry about, virus writers to worry about, and computer crashes to worry about, it seams that we can loss years of photos really easily now. No I am not bad mouthing digital pictures; in fact I am working on scanning in all my old pictures that I have recently found to put them in with all my other pictures. What I am questioning is why we don’t have better off site backups of personal data. Yes many of us will do backups, but we leave them on site, so if something were to happen to where we live we still would lose our data. As of now personal off site backups are very expensive and out of the reach of most people, but the technology are there. The broadband pipes are there, one could have a program that would back up your system every night over the internet (only the files that changes) so that God forbid something ever did happen, you would not loss your precious files. I and I use the word precious because files now are very valuable, not in the monetary sense but in the sense that a picture, or an heirloom is. Just a thought, do with it what you will.
These thoughts today are triggered (there were two other things of more importance then this, but this is what triggered the thoughts tonight) since I did just scan in 65 old pictures, and found that after adding them to my iPhotos Library I had over 3300 pictures on my computer, many of them not replaceable, yes I have them backed up to 2 places, but both are on site, if something were to happen I would lose them all.
The final thing I have to think about, and maybe you my reader, do I scan all my old pictures, even the bad ones? I am thinking not, but it might be nice just to have all my pictures in one place, but I still have about two hundred more pictures to do, I can do about 60 pictures an hour, not bad timing, but still 200 minutes or 3 and a 1/3 hours is a long time to be scanning.
Digital photos do make sharing your memories with you family easer so that is a strong case to keep at lest a copy of all your pictures on the computer.
And if you read this far thanks for reading, and please let me know your thoughts.