Living in the Clouds...

So last night I was trying to make sure that I had all of my pictures backed up. It's something that I always recommend, and I thought I should probably practice what I preach. If you know me, you know it's important for me to take a picture of each of the boys on a daily basis. I've done this since Truck came around and I have only missed a handful of days with him, and very few if any with Coquito. (Although, I did lose some because I thought they were saved in the cloud and they weren't.) I finally had what I thought was everything imported into my photo software (Historian), only to find out that I had nothing for April. Nothing! How the heck could that happen?! So I went to icloud. Nope. Nothing there. Minor panic started to set in. An entire month? No. I know for a fact that I took pictures. So then I started thinking. I had zipped some pictures and put them in to dropbox. (Don't have a dropbox account, let me know. I'll send you a link and it will increase the cloud space we both have for free!) So I pulled those pictures. Still missing 2 weeks worth of April, and March 31. What the heck?! I was frustrated. I decided to check Amazon. Did you know with a Prime membership you have unlimited photo storage in the cloud? I checked there. I was able to recover another week and half worth of photos. Getting closer, but still not quite there. I rechecked my computer. Nope. Still missing pictures. I was not happy. I was distressed. I realize the boys might not worry about it when they're older, but it's something I like to do, and I really do enjoy seeing the way they change on a daily basis. Finally, I remembered that when I plug my phone in to my new laptop (an awesome gift from J before Christmas!), it backs up to Google+. Voila! There were the missing pictures! So, I downloaded them and backed them up. Seriously. I have an external hard drive that has all of the pictures on it, icloud (although it doesn't keep as many as I would like it to), and Amazon. I have another external hard drive that I need to back up to, just haven't gotten around to it. I know, it's a bit much, but pictures are important to me. I like seeing how things have changed, and they help me remember things that otherwise I probably wouldn't. With digital formats today, it's worrisome to me that I'll lose them and not be able to get them back. In the old days, we used negatives and had them printed. I need to get my pictures printed now, too, but man is that going to be an expense! Until then, I'll just stay in the cloud(s)...

Also-as a public service announcement-never put your backup on the same drive/device as your original documents. (J found this out the hard way. No, he didn't do the backup. Someone else did. He didn't find out until it was too late.)

How do you store your important photos or files?