That’s it. From now on, I’m printing out my pictures, even if they just end up sitting in a box collecting dust. That’s the way our parents did it, and it worked just fine, right?

Like everyone else in the world, I have thousands and thousands of digitally stored photos. And because I’m a mother, I actually have about a billion times more than several thousand photos. I have about a trillion. Approximately. Anyway, I printed a handful featuring my daughter from when we brought her home from the hospital so that I could finish up her baby book. And then I hit the brakes with photo printing. But since storing pictures and videos electronically became “how we do it”, I pretty much relied on and had faith that all of my precious memories were safe and secure, tucked in and snuggled up on my computer. Until one day my husband suggested that we back it all up. Great idea. I’d be devastated if we lost all of those images of our daughter taking her first bites of sweet potato or snuggling with our dog (now in dog heaven).

So we backed it all up on a hard drive. And then my computer crashed. Well, freakin phew for that external hard drive! Now I could continue to dream about the day when I would string those 35,000 videos together to make a 165 hour long movie of my daughter’s first 3 years of life. And I could still feel all warm and cozy about the fact that years and years of my life were still neatly filed away by month and year. (I keep my shit organized, yo.)

And then, my husband said, “Hey, Tara? Did you drop the hard drive or anything?”

Oh, hell no.

“NO. WHY?”

“Because it’s not working.” And then I had a heart attack and died.

Phone calls to tech support and various software downloads later, and no luck. And I don’t even like to think about it. I’ve left it to my husband to figure out because A) he’s much more tech savvy than I and B) that I-don’t-even-like-to-think-about-it thing.

Moral of the story: backup your backup. And print out those photos like our parents did waaaaay way back in the 70s and 80s. Even if that means storing them in a shoebox.