Protect Precious Family Moments With These Tech Tools

If you’re like most mothers, then you may have been just a little snap happy over the years. We all want to capture those moments precious to us and our family, from the earliest home videos to snaps the newest addition to the family. All too often, however, these memories are lost because film degrades, data is deleted, and photos fade. But here is how you can make sure you never lose those family moments again.

Back up everything

Most photos and videos taken these days are digital files. We can collect many more of them and they are much easier to share, duplicate, print, and display than ever before. However, they are also much easier to delete. Whether you wipe them by accident or your hard drive gets fried, this no longer has to mean they’re lost forever.

Services like Backblaze allow you to immediately back up your most valued digital files, including videos and pictures, to the Cloud. This is a secure server you can access anywhere online to download them again in future. So, if you delete them and can’t retrieve them or your hardware suffers a malfunction, you can rest assured knowing that you still have a copy out there.

Convert it to digital

While most photos and videos we value are digital, that might not be the case for all of them. Whether you’re fond of using older hardware or you simply have film and photos from much earlier in your life, you might be relying on some outdated methods. Both film and printed photos are very prone to fading and getting damaged over time. If that damage is too severe, you might lose them for good.

Digitizing Scanning photos using high-definition scanners is simple enough and even libraries are starting to offer them in case you don’t want to have to buy one of your own. Now, however, it’s even possible to convert old videos thanks to teams like Perfect Image Video. You can upload and digitize any video on film, regardless of how old the format, so that you have a digital file that you never have to worry about losing again.

Restoring treasured memories

What if the damage is always done? Film and photo restoration are possible, to some degree, depending on the severity of the damage. Photo restoration is much easier, with sites like Fix The Photo able to improvise repairs to even photos that are ripped, faded and discolored. The process mostly involved scanning and uploading them as a digital file, so you might not be able to repair the original, but you can end up with a much higher quality digital copy. That’s just as good, as far as most people are concerned.

Comb your social media

Many of us will automatically upload our photos to social media and forget about them. Many of the social media apps on our phones will even remove the step of having to upload them. You can simply take the photo through the app and there it is. However, it may not be wise to assume that you will always have that social media account. Some of the most popular social media websites of the past have completely disappeared or changed with many old files lost.

There are also more people deleting social media accounts today after recent leaks risking and sharing personal information. You may be of a similar opinion, but don’t delete your Facebook too hastily. Whether it’s for safekeeping or because you want to delete your account, you can use apps that can comb your social media account for pictures you’ve uploaded and give you a copy to download.

Don’t forget your phone

How many of the pictures you take today are taken with a digital camera and how many of them are taken through your smartphone’s camera? There are those that prefer the traditional approach but nowadays, the majority relies mostly on their mobile devices. If that’s the case with you, you don’t want to forget to upload photos to your computer or Cloud before you delete them to make sense. iPhones have their own automatic Cloud storage features, while Android users can use Google+ to make sure that any photos they take are kept in the Cloud for them to download later.

Have a disaster plan at the ready

As mentioned, sometimes disaster can strike. A malfunction can cause your computer to lose great swathes of data or someone may have accidentally deleted files you really wanted to keep. If you haven’t been backing them up, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re entirely out of luck, however.

There are a few ways to help you restore files that have been deleted. This post outlines a five-step strategy for combing through your storage and avoiding overwriting them in your computer’s temporary storage. Recovery tools can dive into this temporary storage to restore even files that have been recently deleted. If you keep using your computer in the meantime, however, this temporary storage is refreshed, and the photos could be lost for good.

Remember to protect your privacy

It may not necessarily be related to ensuring that you don’t lose your photos and videos, but it’s always important to remember the security of your personal memories. There are people out there who will steal the photos of strangers to pose as them or simply to create a new identity. If, like most people, you don’t want to support that kind of behavior, it’s a good idea to make extensive use of the privacy features your social media channels offer. Facebook, for instance, allows you to change the settings so that everything you upload, from photos to videos, is only shown to your friends or even a more select group of people.

Documenting the little moments that make a family life might seem trivial or just for fun in the moment, but years later, they can be some of the most heartwarming and valuable things you own. Make sure they’re lost in the mists of time. Protect the precious memories with the tips above.