How to Preserve Your Life Story Digitally
Diaries and photo albums are among our most valuable possessions. Keeping them online, or creating a digital backup, can help keep them safe. Here's how.
How to Digitise and Preserve Your Precious Memories
Keeping a diary can be hugely rewarding. Daily journaling has been shown to improve sleep, memory, and concentration while reducing stress. On top of all that, a diary keeps your memories organized and allows you to easily look back on treasured moments you might otherwise forget.
However, there are a few problems with a shelf full of journals. Paper diaries take up a lot of space, they aren’t easy to transport, and they can easily be lost or damaged. Plus, finding a specific memory can be time-consuming.
These problems become even bigger when you factor in photo albums, home movies, and boxes of souvenirs. Fortunately, modern technology can make this task a whole lot easier. Here’s how.
Preserving Your Diaries
Diaries are vital sources of knowledge. Historians have learned a huge amount from studying the diaries and journals of people from bygone ages, and some of the world's most precious historical texts started out as personal diaries.
Of course, few paper diaries will survive for thousands of years. Most will start to fall apart after just a few dozen. That’s why museums and libraries put so much time and energy into digitizing their collections — and why it’s a good idea for you to keep a digital diary, too.
A digital diary can be easily backed up, making your memories almost indestructible. A quick text search of your digital journal will take you directly to the memory you want to find.
To keep a digital diary, a text document is perfect — especially if you use a service like Dropbox or Box to automatically back it up. You can also back up your existing paper diaries using these services.
Preserving Your Photographs
Looking through old photo albums with friends or family is a wonderful way to reminisce, and digital photo collections don’t replace that tactile social experience. However, keeping your photos in the cloud keeps them safe and allows you to share them with family all over the world.
The biggest advantage to digital photographs is that they don’t age. A good, high-resolution image stored in the cloud will look great a hundred years from now, while a printed photograph might have become discolored or damaged.
Digitizing printed photographs means scanning them, which can be a painstaking task. Doing just a few at a time helps make the process more manageable, or you can turn to a professional service to do all the technical work for you.
Here is a video to help you get started with preserving your photographs:
Once your photographs are digitized, you can back them up just as you would your diary by storing them on a memory stick or in the cloud. Just like that, your memories are protected and preserved for decades to come.
Audio and Video
While text is usually easy to preserve, audio and video are a bit trickier because digital formats for these media are always changing. Old formats get more and more difficult to access as time goes by.
There’s no need to panic if your most precious memories are stored on video cassettes. It’s still possible to transfer media from one format to another. There are special services that focus on doing this (EachMoment is a good choice), and in some cases, the converted footage will even be cleaner than the original.
Preserving Your Messages
Among the most fragile types of memory are digital messages. These have become more difficult to preserve as technology advances. Apps like WhatsApp allow you to back up and download your messages, and many popular email clients like Google Mail do the same.
Being able to check back through old messages might be just what is needed when it comes to filling in a gap in your memoirs, so taking the time to preserve them is worthwhile.
In Conclusion
Your memories are precious. They bring you happiness, keep you healthy, and tell you who you are and how you’ve been shaped by your past. But they can’t do any of these things if they’re lost or inaccessible. That’s why it’s a great idea to digitize your memories — whether they’re old home movies, precious photographs, or a collection of diaries and letters. Keep them safe, and they’ll bring you joy for many years to come.
Having a digital archive makes writing your memoirs a breeze – especially if you let StoryTerrace do the heavy lifting for you.
We’ll take your memories, photographs, and anecdotes, and turn them into a beautiful bound book. Sound good? Get in touch to schedule a quick chat, or sign up for our newsletter for more information.
How to Digitise and Preserve Your Precious Memories
Keeping a diary can be hugely rewarding. Daily journaling has been shown to improve sleep, memory, and concentration while reducing stress. On top of all that, a diary keeps your memories organized and allows you to easily look back on treasured moments you might otherwise forget.
However, there are a few problems with a shelf full of journals. Paper diaries take up a lot of space, they aren’t easy to transport, and they can easily be lost or damaged. Plus, finding a specific memory can be time-consuming.
These problems become even bigger when you factor in photo albums, home movies, and boxes of souvenirs. Fortunately, modern technology can make this task a whole lot easier. Here’s how.
Preserving Your Diaries
Diaries are vital sources of knowledge. Historians have learned a huge amount from studying the diaries and journals of people from bygone ages, and some of the world's most precious historical texts started out as personal diaries.
Of course, few paper diaries will survive for thousands of years. Most will start to fall apart after just a few dozen. That’s why museums and libraries put so much time and energy into digitizing their collections — and why it’s a good idea for you to keep a digital diary, too.
A digital diary can be easily backed up, making your memories almost indestructible. A quick text search of your digital journal will take you directly to the memory you want to find.
To keep a digital diary, a text document is perfect — especially if you use a service like Dropbox or Box to automatically back it up. You can also back up your existing paper diaries using these services.
Preserving Your Photographs
Looking through old photo albums with friends or family is a wonderful way to reminisce, and digital photo collections don’t replace that tactile social experience. However, keeping your photos in the cloud keeps them safe and allows you to share them with family all over the world.
The biggest advantage to digital photographs is that they don’t age. A good, high-resolution image stored in the cloud will look great a hundred years from now, while a printed photograph might have become discolored or damaged.
Digitizing printed photographs means scanning them, which can be a painstaking task. Doing just a few at a time helps make the process more manageable, or you can turn to a professional service to do all the technical work for you.
Here is a video to help you get started with preserving your photographs:
Once your photographs are digitized, you can back them up just as you would your diary by storing them on a memory stick or in the cloud. Just like that, your memories are protected and preserved for decades to come.
Audio and Video
While text is usually easy to preserve, audio and video are a bit trickier because digital formats for these media are always changing. Old formats get more and more difficult to access as time goes by.
There’s no need to panic if your most precious memories are stored on video cassettes. It’s still possible to transfer media from one format to another. There are special services that focus on doing this (EachMoment is a good choice), and in some cases, the converted footage will even be cleaner than the original.
Preserving Your Messages
Among the most fragile types of memory are digital messages. These have become more difficult to preserve as technology advances. Apps like WhatsApp allow you to back up and download your messages, and many popular email clients like Google Mail do the same.
Being able to check back through old messages might be just what is needed when it comes to filling in a gap in your memoirs, so taking the time to preserve them is worthwhile.
In Conclusion
Your memories are precious. They bring you happiness, keep you healthy, and tell you who you are and how you’ve been shaped by your past. But they can’t do any of these things if they’re lost or inaccessible. That’s why it’s a great idea to digitize your memories — whether they’re old home movies, precious photographs, or a collection of diaries and letters. Keep them safe, and they’ll bring you joy for many years to come.
Having a digital archive makes writing your memoirs a breeze – especially if you let StoryTerrace do the heavy lifting for you.
We’ll take your memories, photographs, and anecdotes, and turn them into a beautiful bound book. Sound good? Get in touch to schedule a quick chat, or sign up for our newsletter for more information.
