Sunday 1 September 2013

Saving pictures: safety in redundancy!

I am guilty of photo mismanagement. Old pictures are precious, especially the ones of people. 

When the children were small, in pre-digital days, I used to send the nicest pictures to the relatives in the Netherlands right away, and did not always get around to have them duplicated. Remember the frustration of peering at negatives to select the best ones for reprinting? I thought my well organized mother would keep the memories safe. I had not taken senility into account. As for the albums we did have, and the negatives, they were partly stored in the attic in the old log house and ignored for years. Many fell victim to moisture and mice.

Come the digital age. Once upon a time, there was the Multiply Auto-uploader. Every photo in this computer was automatically stored in the Cloud. As any good atheist will tell you, do not put your faith in Heaven.

Multiply folded, taking its albums with it. They did give us plenty of notice. I had always duplicated my blogs to Blogger in a half-hearted way. Why? Oh yes, I wanted to have some separate blogs with commercial content. Time was spent making sure everything was in Blogspot, but with some mistakes: when Multiply finally closed its doors for good, some images in old blogs disappeared as well. 

A memory stick with all pictures on it got damaged and is no longer readable. Some time in 2011 I cleared out the computer. Photos in the gallery go back no further than early 2011. Where, oh where did the pictures of our wonderful RV trip to Oregon in 2009 go? Thank goodness: during the cleanup I had created a DVD with everything. Now to upload those contents to Facebook AND Picassa AND a mobile hard drive, all this before we move to the new computer. It is a sleek beauty and an ergonomic joy, but lacks an optical drive.

Meanwhile I stayed up till midnight last night fixing the blogged records of the Oregon trip. It was our best RV trip, almost the last, sniffle. Both the vehicle and the driver are getting too old, though the driver would protest this statement. The Thing gave us 7 years of great pleasure and we still enjoy it as extra living space.

Just to create one more layer of redundancy: one of these days I want to turn our travel blogs into a printed book. 
The Oregon trip starts here: http://freegreenliving.blogspot.ca/2010/11/trip-to-washington-and-oregon-october.html

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