If you have been working on your family history and archiving your media, are you keeping track of where everything is? Saving our digital photos in folders that are labelled by the year they were taken is quite easy. We can even open folders within those to place special events such as weddings, birthdays, trips, and so forth. What is more difficult is keeping track of photos, documents, books and other family treasures that have been kept over the years in a variety of formats and places. It is also difficult to keep track of where these discs are, what thumb drive a photo is on, what Hard drive a collection is on, or, what is on the cloud and what isn’t.
To efficiently archive family history and photo collections, it is helpful to keep a list in a book, binder, spread sheet, or something that is on a computer and printed out. This makes it much easier to know where everything is. An example of this is having archives on external hard drives that are updated on different drives; film that is archived on DVD’s; prints from frames that have been digitized, and the prints are framed on the wall and the jpg files are in a specific place.
Share this document with other family members in case anything happens to your records. Once we have a collection of digitized photos and other media, it is helpful to have everything saved on an external hard drive. This will make it easier to add and update information. It is just as important to have a back up of that hard drive. Now, this can involve several hard drives so make sure we don’t get lost in these drives. I have about 5 Hard drives with archives on all of them.
Now I have been working to clean up my recording system so everything is in one place and nothing is duplicated on the same drive. Had I been more organized in the beginning of this journey, I wouldn’t have to spend valuable time double and triple checking everything. I recently came across a special photo on the computer. A few weeks later I tried to find it and where it is is still a mystery! This was a photo taken in the past ten years.
Box of Photos
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