Digital Dilemma

I've been storing all my pictures on my external hard drive that I've had for several years. I've been good about keeping all my pictures in order by year and grouping them in sub folders by event. Then the other day I went to back up my pictures from the Notre Dame game and got an error. WTF?!

It had occurred to me that this could happen but I was really prepared for it and now I'm kind of at a loss.

Luckily my friend at work is a computer guru and was able to back up my photos from 2006-2012. The 2013 folder was corrupt and unable to be accessed, which in this case is kind of the best outcome.

So now I'm trying to figure out all the pictures I could have possibly taken this year. Luckily I'm always kind of hesitant to delete the pictures off my SD card once they are backed up so I do have most of everything I've done this year saved. Luckily I have the blog to go back and figure out what I've done and try to figure out which pictures may have been lost.

The thing with such easy access to digital photography images is that we take crap tons of pictures and can just easily delete the bad ones later, so we tend to have an over abundance of pictures. Back in the day of film we were more diligent with our 24 pictures on the roll, knowing we had to carefully select which images we wanted to capture. Sometimes I myself even get too caught up in wanting to take great pictures to have to look back on that I forget to actually enjoy the subject matter.

So what to do now. Obviously I'm going to need to get another external hard drive because it wasn't only pictures that was on it. I used it to back up tax documents and my music along with many other things. I didn't double back up lately because I had too much faith in the electronic box storing all my things.

I had mentioned before that I wanted to start making scrapbooks by year using a photo website, which I will now definitely make a priority. But I also need to actually start printing off my pictures. I have tons of pictures in boxes from middle school and high school, then they all just drop off because digital cameras came about and there was no need to have the prints in order to share and see them.

I'm a little bummed, but glad I didn't lose all of them, now I will be extra careful of my pictures and make sure I have them in more than one place.