Backup, Before It's Too Late

It's official. The old hard drive is dead, taking three years of documents, financial data and photographs with it. The only document I can think of that was unusually valuable is our Christmas card list, and the financial data is all in hardcopy form or on websites elsewhere. Losing the pictures, though, is a kick in the gut. We have a select few pictures stored online (including many of our vacation photos, fortunately), we recently printed out a bunch covering the last few years, we have our annual collages, and I think we may still have all of our old pictures on our much older and now unused laptop. There may be a couple of random CDs with pictures on them somewhere, too. The vast majority are gone, however.

In the era of digital cameras, we probably take six to ten times more pictures than we would with regular print film, so many of the lost pictures were not necessarily great pictures. Still, it is distressing to know that several birthday parties, Christmases, vacations and family gatherings are lost to history.

If you take digital pictures, come up with a backup system or three. It seems obvious, but I suspect many more people are like me than are willing to admit, knowing that backing up is a good idea ... to get to tomorrow.

External hard drives are relatively cheap. Get one. We now have a backup system in place. We don't want to go through this again.