I use cloud for everything, but that’s because I did some reflection and realized that I don’t actually have any digital data that would be catastrophic to lose. Annoying, sure. But whatever. I can’t think of a single digital artifact that would be so terrible to lose that it’s worth maintaining highly redundant storage at multiple locations myself.
Catastrophic? People managed to have kids long before computers and cheap photos. They were happy with the tens of good pictures a year they managed to get on film.
Electricity makes significant differences to quality of life and you’re talking about having 100 pictures of your kids instead of 10,000 being “a huge loss and emotional shock”.
That’s frankly pathetic.
There are many people I know alive today (including myself) that don’t obsess over a day by day photo chronology of their children that you will probably never look at 90% of. Yet we all use electricity significantly every day.
Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity?
I don't want the 10,000 photos, just the 30 good ones like my parents had. If all my digital photos disappeared, I'd be left with the random selection I happen to have printed, which is not as select as the photos my parents took of me.
> Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity?
It is not. Electricity is just an example, probably a bad one. I would take it over photos any day.
But I am sure there are some modern conveniences that are really important to you while for others they are not as important. If you lose access to those conveniences, you will feel greatly emotional whether anger, sadness or some other emotion. And most people will sympathize with you and a few people will think that it is pathetic to obsess over whatever it is. And they will repeat same old cliche, "back in the days".
Just because it is not important to you, it does not mean it is "pathetic" if it is important to someone else.
I used to work in consumer-facing tech support shop where we mostly troubleshoot computers. I saw too many people crying in public because they lost all their data including photos of their kids. And only thing they cared about was for us to recover the photos. And if we recovered photos even if only a few, people would cry with joy. They brought us cakes, cookies, and other things as gifts. And if we failed, some people had almost mental breakdown.
Based on while probably small sample size, I do think feeling distress over loss of photos would be a normal reaction for majority of humans.
$20, a half hour of your time, and a Walgreens coupon will give you a hard copy backup of a large stack of photos not much larger than a hard drive that can live in a drawer or shelf for years without worrying about capacitors leaking or any of the other rot that mostly immortal electronics catastrophically suffer.
An annual “print-a-thon” is a good way to capture those things that still matter after a year onto a more robust, albeit less flexible, medium.
Oh I have a lot. All my photos for example. I have moved around so much I don't have all the hard copies anymore. And of the last 20 years there just are no hard copies.
I store them on ZFS shares at various sites and S3 glacier (not Amazon's own though).
I have started to just create physical photo books a few years ago.
It started as a gift to my girlfriend, but now every year we take our best pictures of the year and put it in a photobook. Cant be deleted that way. All the other photos are less important indeed.
I store about 20gig of important photos on my laptop (weddings, events, ... the really important stuff) and everything else is just dumped into google photos. We'll see how that works out in 20 years. But I feel at ease
