On Sunday I had a scare.
My iphone quit turning on. It would not turn on AT ALL! I did some google searching and tried all of the tricks. Nothing was working. The more I read, the more I worried. I was not that concerned about the phone itself. It’s still under warranty and it’s just a phone. But the photos & videos!
I am notoriously bad about downloading photos and videos from my phone and camera. The reason? My hard drive on my laptop is almost completely full. Full of photos and videos and family history.
This is quite a predicament I find myself in. I can barely slow down long enough to keep free space on my computer, let alone get caught up processing all of the photos and videos.
As I was trying to keep calm and solve my problem, I had the sinking feeling that the 700 {700!} short videos and photos were gone forever. Most of these are of my incredibly adorable toddler. Then of course there are plenty of his big teenage brothers. Can you imagine if that spunky little batman photo had been lost forever? I was imagining it. And I was feeling sicker with each passing moment.
After trying everything I could think of and google could suggest, I thought of a technology savvy friend of mine and sent him a message on facebook. I waited a few minutes and then when I hadn’t heard back from him I posted on my facebook wall asking if anyone knew if I would be able to retrieve the videos and photos if my phone were truly dead. In a matter of minutes a friend of mine posted a suggestion – something I had tried over and over. But when I read her comment I thought to myself, ‘Meh, can’t hurt to try it one more time.’ By golly, it worked! Iphone disaster averted. Hallelujah!
So instead of going to bed at bedtime, I stayed up downloading every one of those 700 photos and videos. I had to download them a handful at a time, transfer them to my external hard drive, delete them from iphoto and then start another batch. It took a while. But now every one of those precious items is backed up. On Monday I spent the day uploading the videos to youtube as a second backup. {Don’t worry, they are private.}
I have plenty more backing up, organizing, cleaning out to do on my computer, devices, memory cards etc. But my little iphone crisis was a big wake up call – I NEED to be on top of this.
How do you back up and organize your precious family memories? Do you have any great habits I could learn from? I am a work in progress in this department and I could use all the help I can get.
Ugh. Just ugh. So glad you got them back. Do you use the icloud?
Ugh is exactly right. It was such a relief when I got my phone to turn on. I know we have an icloud account but apparently I don’t use it for my phone. 🙂 I have two teenage boys and we share an apple id, so I was under the impression that it wasn’t going to work very well to use icloud because of the many devices using the same apple id. Now I know that I need to learn about icloud and use it!
So glad you recovered everything!