It's uncanny how sometimes you can think about a topic and then across the world you hear about people losing everything through bush fires, bombings and accidents. Which is why (I think) it's essential to have backups of everything you think is important and store them in multiple locations. Our personal histories are priceless. The photographs that we take may mean little to anyone else, but to us they mean the world. Similarly - our letters, our writings, our personal choice in music and books are the same.

As you think about digitising your pictures, here are other items to think about adding to the digital archive. Insurance documents, photographs of the important front pages of the family bible (that's usually the place where we will find out who owned the family bible before we did and a great source of family history information) and digital copies of any family trees you may have created. Most of these items (bar the insurance documents) are absolutely priceless. No amount of money in the world can replace these items, yet we rarely give them the importance they deserve.

Whilst you cannot digitise your entire book collection (well you can if you want to break every copyright law in the entire world), you can capture the author and title information of these items as you can the music you own. There may even be programs you can use to make copies of your music collection should you want to. I suppose it depends on what is really important to you.

By spending a few minutes on digitising the important things - means should the unthinkable happen and you have to evacuate in a hurry, all you have to do is unplug your computer, grab it and the members of your family and leave. That way you don't have to re-create the world putting everything back together again. Which is always something to think about.