When Memories are stolen
Nothing can be more painful than when memories are stolen! Just imagine… This sadly came true at the end of 2012, when a series of heavy armed burglaries were carried out even here, in our romantic Noordhoek Valley! It hit even some of my dearest friends – and with the highly organized and professional gang focusing on money, jewellery and electronics – here went the brand-new digital camera and laptop. Gone! And with it, all the stored photos and memories…
When Memories are stolen
We so easily forget that in our age of digital photography, photos may still be printed now and then, however, most of them sit on our computers, laptops, ipads, on social networks genre Facebook, Flickr and Picasa or – ideally – on our own websites where we are in control – but meaning in the virtual world. If these costly electronic items disappear for one or another reason, we can still replace them. However, when memories are stolen it really hurts.
Sometimes, the dear ones on the photos are no longer around. Today, most people do not have the typical photo albums with ‘real’ pictures to show around in the family, so theft of our storage items can be a tragedy, as was in this particular case.
Luckily, we are a closely knit bunch of friends and I had regularly taken some photos with my good old NIKON Coolpix P90. Even some of my very first photos on a digital camera!
I pushed it and pushed it – but today was the day that I dug into my oooooooooold computer… In fact, I hardly got it up and running again! But finally I found many precious pictures to help over the loss. In such a dramatic situation one realizes how fast time flies and how many of our two- and four-legged friends have left us far too early. Therefore, if we can at least look at them again, it’s like they’re still around!
While my own private website is my personal choice – and I can only recommend it to all – the fact is that even a website can go down, get hacked or disappear (…so never save on good hosting and support to bail you out then!). But at least we can keep our images on the server, where they should be pretty safe. Although even servers get hacked and go down and even disappear. We’ve seen it all over the years. Funny world we’re living in!
So the lesson here is to ensure we keep our pictures in a safe place – offline and online. Backups are the motto!
Here’s to a happy Sunday!