Embrace Technology

I believe that technology will fail at least once for the majority of people in the next decade or two. It has failed three times for me in the last decade. Through these challenges, I have learned a lot and want to share so that if or when it happens to you, you can protect the memories you care most about.

Digital files are a lot easier to lose than a printed photo or album. We'll still be able to see a printed photo in 50 years, but what about a digital photo? Digital files rely on technology for us to see them. I still have paper copies of old photos, resumes, pay stubs or letters; but I lost old digital copies that are not compatible with today's technology. Will today's files be compatible in 20 years?

So what do I mean when I say to embrace technology? The obvious answer is to understand how our devices work and update our memories when technology changes and becomes discontinued. It's understanding how to preserve our data when our devices change.

Embracing technology is also learning the difference between syncing and backing up. It's understanding the difference between a manual backup and Time Machine backup (for Apple computers or equivalent for PCs).

The brief explanation of the difference is that syncing means that the data is the same on all devices that are connected, whether that is a phone, a computer, cloud or an external drive. Syncing is ONE live copy. If you delete or add something in one place, it gets deleted or added at the other place. It's not a real backup. It can act as a backup if one device breaks and we replace it and sync it to the cloud or other device. But if photos get deleted from a device by mistake or if a cloud service gets corrupted and corrupts our devices; our ONE copy is gone. 

During a server migration, the music social media website, MySpace, lost all the music and posts its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015. Who knows what could happen to a cloud service in the future. What happens if a cloud service has a cyber security event? Syncing isn't a true back-up.

A Time Machine backup (or iPhone backup) is a picture in time of your computer (or iPhone). If you do a Time Machine backup on December 31st and upload it to a new computer on May 1st, your computer will revert to how it was on December 31st. You will lose any changes made since that last backup. If you regularly backup using Time Machine (or iPhone backup), replacing your devices can be seamless.

A manual backup is when you copy files to an external hard drive. If you need to replace your computer, you can reload those files, but your settings, apps and other valuable information will be lost. I lost a valuable file backing up this way when I forgot to backup my desktop folder. This can also be confusing to keep it accurate and up to date, if we don't have an efficient workflow.

We can embrace technology by updating our memories before old technology is discontinued. Many of us have memories on Hi8 or miniDV cassettes; DVDs, CDs or VHS. We have negatives for photos we may no longer have (or have cut or cropped for scrapbooks). 

During my scrapbooking days, I cropped photos and taped them into albums. I had doubles of the best ones and the negatives organized chronologically if I ever wanted a copy. 

Digital cameras didn't exist when I started scrapbooking. I had no idea that eventually, I could want my physical photos digitized. I couldn't imagine that photo stores would disappear and only a handful would still print from negatives. 

The first step to preserving our memories is understanding where they are, in what format and what is most at risk of being lost. Since it can feel overwhelming, we need to prioritize what is most important and the technology most at risk of being obsolete.

Are you ready to make preserving your memories a priority? I'd love to hear from you and inspire you to preserve the memories that matter the most to you.