Backing up your pictures

The importance of backing up my pictures has been on my mind lately. I had my hard drive go bad and it was less than 3 years old. I've been using multiple external hard drives to back up my pictures because I lost some in a previous hard drive failure. I thought I was being so diligent but found out the external hard drives have a limited life span of about 5 years. I've backed everything up to an account on the cloud but I still worry about failure with that system. So what's the solution? With each type of media, we've always been told to use multiple backups. I had several cd's and dvd's with my photo library on them, but most computers now don't have drives to read them so as technology changes, how do we keep our pictures safe? How many times have you taken pictures on your phone and you get an error message saying your memory is full? You start deleting you photos to make room for your new memories or you think you'll download them later.  My important pictures I print as well as backing up in several locations. I read an article one time that talked about how we are in danger of losing our history because we delete so much and don't have hard copies. I keep my journals online but need to make sure that is also backed up in several places. We need to be proactive in preserving our memories so our children and our children's children can have access to them. What can you do today to ensure you don't lose your memories or photos?  When was the last time you updated your family pictures? Maybe it's time to do that too, families grow and change and before we know it, the kids are ready to move onto their next adventure.

Only picture...

I had the privilege of meeting a woman who has faced many challenges in her life. She realizes she is a stronger person because of the trials in her life and she is doing her best to make lemonade out of lemons. She doesn't have many mementos of her growing up years, in fact, she only has 1 picture of when she was a child. Here's the original, it was scratched, faded, stained and she didn't remember who the other child in the picture was and so she wanted her removed.

Being able to help people preserve their history is what it's all about. I love helping them save their photos.

4 generations

We all want to save those special memories we have so we can remember the experience in our lives. As we grow older, we experience more and things that we said we would never forget are moved to the back of our brain and it becomes harder to recall them. Capturing memories through pictures helps us to relieve those moments, and also bring back the emotions of the moment. We live in a society now where everything is recorded, selfies have become the norm. But in the film era, pictures were taken more sparingly and printed to hang on walls or to keep in albums that we looked at as often as possible. Family stories were shared with younger children as grandparents explained the pictures and children learned about their own histories. Not every family has the opportunity to have multiple generations pictures, but those that do cherish the pictures.  The picture was taken in 1963 and included great-grandma, grandma, mom and daughter as a means of including a visit of extended family.

While in pretty good shape, they wanted to be able to make a larger print. So I cleaned it up and was able to make prints in 8x10s. There is one other 4 generation picture that was taken a few years later and it was the last one because the great-grandma passed away in 1972.

The grandma passed away in 1989 and  the mom is now the grandma and the baby is now mom to 4 amazing children. The best the family can do is 3 generation pictures but those pictures are cherished as much as these 4 generation pictures. I love hearing the stories behind the pictures and hearing about families experiences, but I have to admit that I know so much about these pictures because I was the little baby in the pictures.

Kids

Sometimes the hardest pictures to take are those of your own family.  My kids are willing to let other people take their pictures, but when it comes to mom, they hide when they see the camera.  I love being able to take pictures of my kids and getting them to laugh and just have fun.  Watching them makes me realize they grow up way to fast. But I am so lucky to be their mom.