It's a Team's Life Are we losing our memories?

[chillout]

We are taking amazing pictures with our phones of all things and very seldom do i see anyone using a camera. What is happening to these pictures? Are they being deleted to make room for more pictures? I cannot remember the last time I heard of someone sitting around looking at an album laughing and sharing memories. The past is beginning to look very blank to me.

There are cameras EVERYWHERE and yet not to long after taking that photo it is deleted. It is great to always have a camera with us to get that special shot and then it is shared on Facebook or deleted to become lost in memories. Have you figured out a way to save those special pictures or will they in short time become lost in history and deleted, as you need more room to take more pictures?

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[ATeam]

It has always been the case that precious photos can be lost. Printed albums get destroyed by fire and flood. Digital photos get destroyed by accidental deletion or by the loss or failure of the device on which they are stored. In these digital days, it is wise to create backups of everything (including digital backups of printed photos), and store that information in a place where it will not be lost if the primary storage place is destroyed or fails. One place is the cloud Another place is an external hard drive that is stored at a location other than where your primary device is.

When Diane and I were on the road, we accomplished this by using USB drives. Our primary data place was our laptop computers. We'd periodically mail home backups on external drives. In the event of a computer loss of failure, it would be a simple matter to buy a new computer and recover the files from the most recent USB drive.

Now the cloud is a more viable option. We have ours set up such that any file we create (or new photo) is automatically backed up into the cloud. Every now and then, we save that folder as a folder of another name. That is to protect us from our own errors. With automatic cloud storage, if you delete something locally, it is deleted from the cloud too. The folder of another name breaks that connection and safely retains your data. If your device fails, it's in the cloud. If you lose access to the cloud, it's in your device. If you blow it and accidentally delete your important files, it's in the cloud, in the folder of another name.

Whatever method you use to preserve your photos, it takes time to curate your collection. Diane and I took over 40,000 photos in our 10 years on the road. In that mess, there may be 5,000 or even 1,000 that are of true memory-enhancing value. Our thinking was to save them now, curate them later and that's what's going on. Every now and then, when I get the urge to revive our trucking memories, I jump into the collection for a few minutes to develop meaningful albums.