Fire-Proof Safe

You have a house. You have stuff. You want to keep it safe at night. You buy a lock box. 

The first question when shopping for a home safe is what do you want to put in it. Big things? Little things? Jewelry? Documents? Photo albums? Going through this exercise made me realize the only possessions I have that are truly irreplaceable are my data. Pictures and videos of loved ones in exotic locales. Fun we had. How young we were. You're not getting that back and all you can keep in this modern world is memories and digital shadows cast in micrometric silicon.

Protect it. Guard it jealously. Copy and save every last pixel. Store it in three places, at least one offsite. Someone will steal your laptop, you'll lose your backpack, your hard drive will fail, your house will burn down. Someday you will find an old picture you never noticed before and zoom in as far as you possibly can and wish you could keep zooming into more and more detail until you feel like you're back there again, that moment in time. You'll want to save in native resolution for that.

So it goes, I have the raw camera data on a portable hard drive backed up to another external hard drive at home and uploaded to cloud storage just in case. Keenai promises unlimited photo storage and I intend to take advantage of it. We'll see, I'm still on my extended free trial and I'm still uploading digital negatives. The finished photos are on my laptop, google photos, Keenai, and a few other sharing sites.

So if there's a fire, or burglars, or aliens researching human nostalgia, we can feel better knowing the sentimental jewelry is safe, the hard-to-replace documents are secure, the equipment is insured, and the data is backed up. I know I will always have my pictures.

That's one less thing to worry about.