January and February tend to be a bit of a recovery period for me. After the rush of a fall busy season, I’m ready for some much needed rest and often try to work on personal goals I have set for myself alongside the goals I set for my business.
My goal for 2021 is to begin recovering family photos I lost almost two years ago. You see, I wasn’t very wise in my backup system. I thought that just because I had all my pictures on an external hard drive, because my laptop simply couldn’t hold all those files, that was backup enough. Unfortunately, accidents happen. In my case, that one slip and fall of the external hard drive hitting the floor caused a complete loss of all the information stored there.
As someone who’s profession is capturing images for others I felt like a failure. Years and years worth of family photos I had been so diligently taking were gone due to one little accident. Why had I not had a second backup? How had I been so careless?
It sent me to a bad place mentally. I recall breaking down in tears for weeks afterwards. I had created these sweet little birthday books for my kids each year of the images I’d taken throughout the year and every time they asked when I’d be making their books again, it was like being stabbed in the heart. I simply couldn’t get over what I’d done.
Now, here I am two years later and it still hurts badly, and I don’t know how much I’m going to truly be able to recover, but I have hope. I was avid about sharing my images with family as well as on my social media accounts. I know that I’ll be able to glean enough of what was lost to at least start healing the wound I created. I’m on the path to restoration. Not only the restoration of our family catalog of images, but the restoration of my heart and soul.
I’m currently working my way through a workshop from a professional photo organizer, Miss Freddy, entitled Backup Bootcamp. A good friend clued me in to this program, and then not too long after that I had also heard Casey on one of my favorite podcasts, The Lazy Genius. You can listen to the episode here.
I think it’s going to be very eye opening and hard work. But I’m willing to put in the work to restore what’s been lost. I cannot imagine my kids missing years of their lives in photographs. It means too much to them and to me.
I’m hoping to share updates about my experience along the way, so keep checking back. And, please, don’t let this happen to you! Take the time to invest in organizing your photos and having several backup systems in place. If you have questions about that, reach out and I can share with you what’s working for me.
For now I’m buckling down and putting my nose to the grindstone and making the best of what I can.
“Now is not the time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
