This week I read an article about a California couple whose camera bag was stolen while they were enjoying a day at Disneyland. In it were all the memory cards they owned filled with every last photo and video they'd taken since their baby girl was born. They are now pleading with the public via social media for those cards to be returned. This sad story got me thinking about our memories and how misguided many of us are about how to properly store and archive our photos.

First and most importantly, memory cards aren't ideal for long-term storage of your photos. They're small, easily lost and/or stolen and are more fragile than, say, an external hard drive. If you DO choose to use them as long-term storage and they are the ONLY place you have your photos, then by all means, store them some place secure, like an in-home fire-proof safe or in a bank deposit box. Carrying around and traveling with your entire photo collection of your first born baby in your camera bag is a disaster waiting to happen. And in this couple's case, DID happen.

Second, and I've written about it before, your photos need to be backed up in several locations. For instance, an external hard drive at home, an external hard drive at a friend or neighbor's home, prints of your 5-star photos and somewhere in the cloud. This means that if your hard drive crashes or your house burns down, you'll always have another copy of your photos accessible elsewhere. All too often, when disaster strikes, we see on the news that the main possession people come back to find are their photos and the memories and comfort they provide.

Third, so many of us harbor stress and anxiety around losing our photos, yet don't take the proper steps to back them up. It's not rocket science and does take a little effort, but once you have a solid back-up system in place, you can rest easy knowing that you'll never lose all those precious memories. And removing even one source of stress in our lives can make a HUGE difference!

The morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in my windowless office in Canal Center Plaza in Alexandria, VA, situated right on the Potomac River about 2-3 miles away from the Pentagon and National Airport and 3-4 miles from the Capitol and White House.

Sometime shortly after 9am, I received a call from a friend telling me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in NYC. I was in total disbelief. At the time, my cousin's family, including their two small children, were living in Battery Park within sight of those Towers, in addition to all my other cherished Manhattan relatives uptown and I immediately started to panic about them.

The word started to spread amongst my colleagues, and many of us wanted to leave, but our leaders told us to stay put. Then came the news that a plane was heading for DC. Next report was that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. Again, I was in disbelief. We were only a few miles from there and surely we would have heard the explosion. Regardless, that news was enough for me to take matters into my own hands. My thinking at the time was that if we were destined to die, I didn't want to die at my office amongst work colleagues, I wanted to die among friends and family. So I ignored my boss' request to stay, packed my personal belongings and left. My friend lived in an apartment nearby and hadn't left for work, so I decided to ride out the crazy chaos with him. As I was driving, the radio announcer started reporting another plane heading for DC. I was behind the wheel, crouching down, trying to look up and out my front windshield, to see if a plane was heading my way. (As I type this, my hands are shaking like a leaf at the memories.) My friend's apartment was near Alexandria Hospital and little did I know they were transporting all the Pentagon victims there. I tried and tried to get to his neighborhood, but all the streets were closed in the area, to allow the emergency vehicles faster access to the hospital. As the ambulances were flying by me, I realized I wouldn't be able to get anywhere near his neighborhood, so I parked my car on a random street, locked it up and started walking. It was a long and terrifying walk, but eventually I made it safely to his apartment. Then we switched on the news and saw the horror of what had happened. We were glued to the TV for hours. 

I will never forget those images. I will never forget struggling to make a cell connection with my NYC relatives to ensure they were all OK. I will never forget the smoky smell as I stepped outside the next morning, the smell of our burning Pentagon. It was truly surreal.  I will never forget the roar of the fighter jets circling our city night after night, month after month, waking me up repeatedly and re-instilling fear at every pass. I will never forget those thousands of precious lives lost and their loved ones who carry on. I will never forget.

Our country was changed in an instant, that beautiful September morning, and so was I. Our leaders have managed to avert another crisis of that magnitude on our shores, but there are so many countries on our planet that are facing these horrors daily. And we can never forget their pain, their fear and their desire to live a peaceful life. Let us never forget not just ourselves, but all of our fellow humans who deserve to live terror-free.

P.S. Please feel free to share your memories of that eventful day in the comments below. I'd love to hear them!

This was the scene in the court next to mine earlier this evening. A house engulfed in flames in a matter of minutes. Thankfully, the two residents who were home at the time got out safely. But guess what was the first thing she mentioned after saying all was lost? Her PICTURES. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when tragedy strikes, what people want most are their pictures, not their clothes, their jewelry, their furniture. Their PICTURES. And sadly, so many of us don’t take the time to BACK UP our photo collections until it’s too late. 

Here are a few steps to take to protect your non-digital photo collection:

1) For the boxes and bags of prints you have from the pre-digital days, possibly scattered all over your house, gather them all in one place.
2) Next, commit the time to sorting through and organizing them.
3) Once organized, put them in an archival storage box that is easily accessible to grab in case of emergency. 
4) Another option with prints is to hire a reputable company like FotoBridge to scan them all to digital so they can be backed up along with the rest. 

For your digital photo collection, it’s common advice now to back up your digital files in at least three places. Two of those should be off site and at least one as far removed from you geographically as possible should disaster strike.

Here are several options for backing up your digital files:

1) Use an external hard drive (EHD) like PictureKeeper, that makes it ridiculously easy to collect ALL the digital images from your computer. Then keep the EHD either in a fire-proof safe, a safe deposit box or even send to a friend to store for you.
2) Use a cloud storage service like Carbonite or This Life which will cover you for remote location storage.
3) Burn your images to archival-quality DVDs like these from MAM-A and, again, put them in a fire-proof safe, a safe deposit box or a friend's house. 

I'm in this business because I care about protecting your family's cherished memories. I don't want to see another family in tears because they've lost everything, including their photos. I implore you to develop a back-up plan for your photo collection in the event of a catastrophe. We never want to think it could happen to us, but there's no harm in planning for the worst. If tragedy were to strike, you’ll be crying about your lost “stuff,” but feeling grateful that your photos are safe off site and can be recovered with ease.

This post has joined the Let's Get Organized Blog Hop over at Dinosaur Superhero Mommy's site.