I've been looking at the family history of late. Well it's been Christmas and New Year and supposedly a Holiday (as in you're supposed to have time to do personal projects and things you want to do). The first thing I did was I found all the physical photographs and started combing through them. Have you noticed how many photographs (actual physical ones) you have. Have you also noticed how they get less and less the further back you get? The reason is simple - it was expensive to take pictures, and get them developed - so people were less likely to take frivolous shots. Today of course it's a completely different story. Every device has a camera on it. Even my laptop has a 2 megapixel camera built in (not that I've used it yet you understand). And as storage gets cheaper and more abundant - who would have thought about buying a one terabyte external storage device a few years ago (apart from the tech crowd that is), we can store more and more in electronic format.

With storage though we also have the the cloud option - as in sending things to storage on the World Wide Web. Sites like Flickr and Facebook for example. But if you want a backup but don't want to share your works of art - you can always send yourself an attachment via any of the email accounts that are available.

So it shouldn't come as any surprise that we've been thinking about putting our physical history into the digital realm. We can either scan it or take a photograph of a photograph. Yes it takes time to do these things and you may ask - why bother. But consider this - what would be the one thing (apart from family members, your animals and your handbag/wallet) you would pick up and leave the house with if you need to?

Personally I would take my laptop and external hard drive. So it would make sense for me to know what physical items I've got. At least if something happens to the physical item I've still got a backup.