What’s important to you?

Your family.  Your home.  Your car.  Your things.  Are these things important to you? If so, we invest in and insure these things so that they’re preserved.   What about your memories and specifically your photos?  Are they important to you as well?  Most of us say yes.  Take the time to be sure your memories are preserved.  There’s nothing more heartbreaking than losing a photo memory and this happens more often than you think.  Photos stored in boxes in attics and basements can be destroyed by heat and moisture and the memory is lost.  Digital photos are surprising just as susceptible to being lost.  Why? Because we aren’t backing up our data. The advent of digital photography drastically changed how we stored photos.  If we’re diligent and uploaded the digital photos from our camera’s media, we then moved the digital files to our computer.  All was well until the computer crashes and we struggle to restore the hard drive.  Fast forward a few years and cameras on smartphones again revolutionized photography and videography.  Our phones now house thousands of photos and videos and often do.  Until they don’t.

Redundancy.  Redundancy.  Redundancy.

So, how do we ensure that we don’t lose these digital memories?  Back them up.  And back them up in multiples places.  For your digital photos files, as well as programs and other content on your computer, I recommend a three-pronged approach – an external drive, iCloud and an additional online backup such as Carbonite.  Work with your IT professional to set this up – this is well worth the time and expense to organize and manage your memories and content.  For your phone, are you are actually backing up the phone to the cloud?  Because we’re busy, we often ignore those pesky little notices that tell us we’re out of storage or the backup failed and our content, including photos, is not being backed up.  I have seen clients lose THOUSANDS of precious photos on their phones.  Trust me, this is heartbreaking.  Take the simple steps to keep your memories safe.

What we give our time to shows what we value.  Take the time to organize, back up and preserve your memories.