Comment by socalgal2
4 days ago
I backed up my photos religiously for years. From my first digital camera in like 1995. First to CD-ROMs, then DVD-ROMs, then hard drives, and I included online backups to Google Cloud (real backups via arq, not Google Photos).
My arq bot was running on my 2014 Intel Macbook Pro which would read the photos off my home server and back them up. (the server also being a local backup).
Then I got my M1 Mac and IIRC, arq didn't run there yet or required a newer version that was incompatible with the old or maybe I was just lazy. I don't remember clearly. That was 4 years ago.
Recently I thought I should really get that fixed and get my photos backed up again. My last 4 years of photos are not "backed up" to the cloud. They are backed up to my home server.
AND........ I'm starting to wonder if there is really a point. Do I really need those backups? A podcast I listen to went over how he wanted to leave his cherished books to his kids (all adults). But then he reflected that he didn't really want his dad's books and had the hard realization that his memories of his books are his and his alone and that his kids won't really want his books.
Similarly, my photos and the memories that go with them are almost all mine and mine alone and when I pass away, no one will want them. I actually scanned all of my grandmother's photo books, before she passed away. The majority of those photos have no meaning to me and she's not around to tell me what they are. Of course the ones close family are in have some meaning. Similarly, I scanned my dad's slide collection in like 2005 and none of the photos of him with friends or him with is 2nd wife have any meaning to me.
So, then my question to myself is. Do I really need to back them up more? To go through the trouble of setting up cloud storage, getting backup software working, dealing with the maintainance of that setup. If I lost them would it really be that bad?
Let me add, they are all uploaded to Google Photos, not as backup but as access, and phone based photos are also all auto-uploaded. I'd lose the origanziation I have in my personal backups, and the quality (don't have Google Photos set to full quality).
I have a digital archive of photos going back to the 1930s, and have physical archives of negatives and slides preserved properly. Not everything is scanned, but it will probably remain on my "to do" list permanently. B/W 114 negs from my grandfather contain many unidentified and unidentifiable people, but there are also views of where I grew up 90 years ago.
I agree with you that a certain portion of images are no longer meaningful, but it's tough to say a-priori what those are. So keep them all. The real problem is that photos often have notes on the back, but digital images rarely have any metadata.
I foresaw this problem back in 2002 and have been using a time-oriented naming convention and keeping little XML files with notes. I posted a little rant about it back in the day and made some simple tooling, which has been good enough to keep some basic notes with my photos.
https://pixtag.org/
This is just a guess, but I bet if your grandma's photo books had some sort of narration or her personal notes, you would have valued them more.
I've sometimes passed on sentimental keepsakes, only to long for them later. What seems pointless yesterday, suddenly has new meaning as I get older and gain new perspectives. In particular, my Mom passed a few years ago, and there are questions I wish I could go back and ask now that some time has passed. There are items I tossed that I wish I had at least snapped a picture of them for reference. I didn't understand the significance of certain documents in the moment.
Maybe the answer is to pick out stories that are important and include some sort of narration. Maybe the answer is to throw away the pictures without meaning and savor the ones with meaning, and make sure that meaning is recorded for your kids.
> when I pass away, no one will want them.
That's the point. I am lucky that I have kids and maybe they will like to take a look at some pics once in a while but certainly they won't go through ten thousands of images.