So, summer is upon us and that means one thing for gamers. The Steam Summer Sale. Can you say 75% off Mirrors Edge? Cause I can. And I did. And a few other games.
But that's not what this is about. This is about a very important thing in our lives. Memories. How does this relate to buying dirt cheap video games? It's because I had to tweak my hard drive partitioning to fit some of the games because I have quite a lot. Again, that's a little beside the point, but we're getting closer.
I have a 500GB hard drive in my laptop, which for most college students would be plenty. But I'm not the average college student. For one, I take CIT classes that require storage intensive programs, and for another I'm a GoPro fanatic that has a good chunk of that hard drive dedicated to those videos along with pictures, documents and music.
A few nights ago, my external hard drive decided to crap out on me, and I started freaking out. I had my life backed up on there. I had my Windows Disk image, school projects since high school and tons of GoPro memories. After a minute I calmed down because I remembered that all those files were backed up multiple times over.
-My Windows disk image was on a USB drive and (now) another CD
-My documents were backed up in Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive
-My pictures and videos were on primary internal, back up internal and backup external hard drive in a fireproof safe at my parents house.
I would have to really have to try to destroy things in order to get rid of everything. So I'm not too torn up about things. Which brings me to a point of this
BACK UP YOUR CRAP.
Seriously. If you have one hard drive that contains your life on it, you're asking for trouble. For $50 you can have a Terabyte hard drive that will keep most everything you could want on it.
Which brings me to another point, my family is not in that category. There's a reason my dad has 6 Terabytes of storage in his computer. We use a good chunk of it. A while ago my dad recorded off all of our old analog home videos to digital. After that was said and done and counted along side our existing digital video, we had over 2 Terabytes of video. With HD video getting bigger and bigger, it's only using up more space.
On top of the videos, we have all our pictures converted to digital. The summer before college I scanned in over 25,000 pictures spanning a 30 year time period. In total, we now have close to 35,000 photos on our hard drive. To further put that in perspective, in 2008, my mom got a DSLR camera for Christmas. Since that time till now, we've shot over 7,000 photos. So we've shot 20% of our photos on our hard drive in the last 6 years. To add to the hard drive strain, those photos are an average of 6 Megabytes in size. Your standard camera will take about 100 Kilobytes. They're a lot bigger.
But now I'm rambling. The really cool part about all of this is the fact that these photos and videos are instantly accessible. I can go home, get on my laptop and in a few clicks, access these photos on my dad's computer and start a slide show of our Disneyland trip in 1996 because they're there and they're organized by year and month, usually with a tag about what's happening in the album. This is all awesome because our brains are not hard drives. Memories come in fragmented and fuzzy for most. Heck, most my memories are actually just replays of home videos. with the digital age, it's easier than ever to have those memories back.
Want them printed? Click. Done.
Upload a cute photo of us cousins to Facebook? Click. Done.
It's that easy once all is said and done.
I know so many people that all they have is a photo album or two to flip through, or they're photos are still titled "DS10000232" or whatever on there hard drive. That would be maddening to me.
So my plea to you is two fold.
First is to back up those memories you have. Put them in a safe, take a copy to grandma's house or a safety deposit box, because two is one and one is none when things go wrong.
The second is to start copying those photos to digital. Most scanners will have trays to do negatives, or you can scan in the prints. Both work. Videos need some special software and equipment, but it's fairly easy. Because the fact is that right now those prints are sitting in that dusty old cardboard box in your basement storage. That one solitary copy is encased in cardboard inside a wood frame house.
And those two things are flammable.
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