In the modern age, it’s a lot easier to keep memories safer than it was years ago.  It used to be that if you lost a photo, and didn’t have its original, or negative, it would be gone forever.  But now thanks to the invention of digital preservation, there are more options than ever to keep old and new photos safe forever.

Many people out there only have negatives, slides, or prints of their special occasions and loved ones, and they risk tragically losing them in natural disasters, resulting in those irreplaceable images being lost.  If they had backed them up digitally, they would always have them.  You can do a web search for photos lost in fire and countless entries come up where people lost a lifetime’s worth of photos that they will never get back.

Whether you have negatives or slides, there are many options out there to turn them into digital.  There are online labs that will digitize your old negatives and slides at a cheap cost, like Scan Cafe and GoPhoto.  But you can even go to your local Costco and have their lab do it for you too.  There are some risks though to think about of having a stranger taking your precious memories out of your hands.  The cost can also add up depending on how many photos you want digitized.

If money and trust are an issue, another option is to do it yourself with a Film and Negative Scanner.  It’s an easy search online to find some on Amazon, like the Kodak Scanzaor the Canon CanoScan.   But word of warning, it can get very tedious since you’ll be scanning each one on its own, again and again, so an online lab may be a better way to go due to their convenience and quick turnaround times.

Once you have your images into a digital format, then the question comes up of how to back them up so that they are somewhere safe and easily accessible anywhere you go.  It’s great to be away from your home and know that you can pull up your images anytime. Or if you suddenly have to evacuate from your home, it’s reassuring to know you can quickly grab one item that contains all of your memories throughout your life, rather than digging through boxes and stumbling to find room in your car.

In backing your photos up, one option is to use a cloud based application such as ICloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive.  With internet speeds only getting faster, this is a quick and easy way to make sure your memories are always accessible.  Whether you’re at your home, away on a trip, or at a relative’s house, your priceless memories will be available to view at the simple click of a button.

The second option is backing your photos up on an External or Flash Drive. In terms of space, there are many possibilities.  You can get drives now up to eight terabytes (8TB,) and to put it in perspective, just one terabyte (1TB) can hold up to two million photos!  File sizes may be increasing in size, but no need to worry, because the size of these drives are increasing even faster, so there will always be enough space, either on a drive or on a cloud based application.

It may seem like a lot to digitize your photos to assure their safe, usable, and easily accessible.  But once you do, you’ll sleep much better at night!  You don’t have to worry about any fire or hurricane destroying your home and all of your priceless memories be gone.  Another thing is the worry digital causes some people that are used to having something they can hold.  No need to stress, with these digital images you can still browse an online shop like Vistaprint and order albums, wall portraits, collages, the possibilities are endless with digital preservation!