The value of digitizing your life

I have always been reluctant about committing the things in my life to exist on the servers of some web service. The biggest part of it I will readily admit is the generation I come from. A generation that believes in accumulating ‘stuff’. Stuff that for the most part is just physical mementos of events that have taken place in our lives. We stick them away in photo albums, scrapbooks and buried in drawers to be pulled out on the rare occasion we want to take a trip down memory lane.

Then there is just the plain old junk that human beings seem to love to accumulate around themselves. Scraps of paper with long forgotten addresses, date books from years gone by and many other types of miscellaneous crap. Much of it we have long forgotten why we kept it in the first place but even though the tugs on our memories are gone we still hold onto them.

But what happens should – god forbid – a disaster happen?

Instead of memories that we can pull out and share we have fragments of smoke seared photographs. All those cards that we held so dear have been destroyed beyond any recognition. Baby pictures, wedding pictures, photos of family gatherings, our children’s first drawing, their first report cards – all destroyed.

At what point does a cranky old fart’s desire to be able to hold physical things transform to understanding that any reluctance to transform those things into digital form is actually endangering the live of those memories. There comes a point where one has to realize that as much as we may have a feeling of trepidation at moving those memories to a digital format, we also have to realize that is the one way to keep those memories safe.

I hadn’t really thought about this idea of digitizing one’s life as being a way to keep it safe until I read a post on Computerworld by Mike Elgan where he shared his move to committing his family’s memories to a digital format. While Mike was chronicling his digitizing of his family’ memories because of his desire to move to more of a semi-nomadic life he also touched on the loss of those physical representation of memories.

When it comes to deciding whether to keep or discard something, where do you draw the line? Old holiday and birthday cards? OK, those can be discarded. Mother’s day cards from kids? Hmmm. Trophies? Yikes! There are a million items that make you feel a loss when you toss, but if you keep them, they’ll be buried unseen for decades.

It’s these same items that are irreplaceable after an unexpected fire, flood, hurricane or other regional or personal disaster.

I might not being going down the same path or have the same reason that Mike did but the end point is the same – protecting those valuable memories. Protecting them in case some disaster hits and those memories only exist in a tired old brain. Mike gives a great breakdown of how best to go about digitizing your memories and I thank him for that.

How safe are your memories? Would they survive a fire or make it through unscathed from a flood?