Today we thought we would share how we preserve our own family memories. Both our VHS and old 8mm film reels have been preserved using the very same methods we use for our customers. We have chosen to keep hard copies (on DVD) because we enjoy having a collection of family movies we can pull out and share on special occasions like birthdays, Christmas, family reunions, etc. It is nice to have everything in our hands rather than solely storing them with a cloud service we can’t control or on a hard drive. As a backup method, we keep our home movies on a hard drive on our computer dedicated to family movies and family photos. At the end of each year, we transfer the movies and photos to an external hard drive for storage.
Cell phone videos and photos we upload to our computer using iphoto after each family trip or special outing. iphoto has cloud-based capabilities in addition to saving copies of photos on the selected drive in our computer. As our backup, we create beautiful photobooks annually of our “year in review” using companies like Mixbook who keep copies of your projects on their servers for future orders.
As you can see, our preservation method includes the initial digitizing of our family memories (the same process we use for our customers), backups (hard copies and digital files stored on our computers), and back-ups of our back-ups (hard drives for archives or photobooks with cloud storage for our family photos). We hope this article has helped you decide how you would like to back up your own family memories. If you need help preserving your memories on DVD or as digital files, please reach out to us at 805-377-7333. We’re here for you.