[Note: I'm transcribing the videos I posted on my YouTube Channel and back dating them to when I posted the videos for people who prefer reading. If you prefer watching the video, visit my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@suzannesewell]
Why am I so passionate about memories? I want to be in control of my memories and not lose them as technology changes, as devices break or get lost or even natural disasters. I want to help people ensure their memories are protected.
The first thing we need to do to preserve our memories is to understand the technology and where our photos are. We need to ensure that our phones, our computers and SD cards are backed up and how that works. I will cover this in more detail in a later post.
My husband and I have had multiple drives fail and it's scary. The first time, our MacBook was getting the blue screen of death. It would work for 10-15 minutes at a time but then would shut down. During the times when it worked, I was frantically copying files and photos to an external hard drive in order to preserve them. I managed to save most of the files that were meaningful, but lost a few. It hurts and is frustrating to lose files.
We then started to do time machine backups on our computers. When our iMac drive failed, we managed to preserve almost everything by recovering files from the Time Machine backup. A computer failing is like a fire destroying photo albums. I wrote in my last post that since I was a child, I knew that if I had time, in case of fire, I would grab the photo albums. It was a fear I often thought about.
It's been a learning process over the years, as one machine breaks, of learning how it worked and staying up to date with technology. A lot of times I didn't understand and when it failed, that's when I learned what I didn't understand.
Last year, I was preparing a presentation for a moms group about preserving memories and I wasn't sure whether I wanted to talk about technology. Everyone doesn't have the same technology and I'm not a technology expert. I have lost memories when technology failed me and I didn't fully understand how it worked. That's how I learned, but I didn't want to learn everyone's technology so I didn't want to bring it up.
But as I was writing my presentation on my MacBook where all my photos were stored, my MacBook broke, two weeks before my presentation. So I thought, the universe wants me to talk about technology. I can't resist bringing it up. I asked the moms, if your computer failed or you lost your phone, would you be okay? Would your memories be preserved? Many moms' eyes opened wide with fear. I may not be able to teach someone how to preserve or recover their memories, but I hope to inspire them to learn or hire someone to help them.
When it happened to me that time, I was bummed to spend a lot of money on a new computer and because I was in a rush for the replacement, I didn't get the ideal computer for me, I bought something in stock. It was a calm process because this time, I also had a cloud backup. I recently realized that perhaps I didn't save everything once again, because again, I didn't fully understand how icloud worked. But that's a conversation for another day.
The first thing is understanding the technology we're using with our computers, phones and cameras and that is also for our old video cameras and cassettes we used to use and quality settings when we're digitizing. I'll be covering more of these topics in future posts. The first step is understanding where our memories are so we can preserve our collection as a whole.
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