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Slice of Life

Digital Fragility of Memories

The last photo from 2011 when I was visiting family in Montana.
The last photo from 2011 when I was visiting family in Montana.

I just made the unfortunate discovery that I now have absolutely no photos from August to December of 2011, which were my first months here in Denver. I am feeling shocked, saddened, angry….whatever other feeling one would have upon this discovery.

This is how this happened: I got a brand new laptop at the start of the year as a gift, and I told my sister Lisa that I would give her my own laptop. So I proceeded to transfer supposedly all my photos, music, and other files from my old computer onto my new computer and my cloud storage. Then, thinking I had transferred absolutely EVERYTHING over to the new computer, I deleted all my personal files on the old computer so there’d be space for my sister to save her files.

Somehow during the transferring process I overlooked the fact that I somehow didn’t get any photos from August to December 2011 transferred over…hence my discovery of this situation today. I was for photos from that time period since it is National Siblings Day and thought of one photo I had taken with a couple of my siblings that Christmas. Well, that photo is no more unless my brother Adam has it.

This whole situation reminds me of how ten years ago, I lost all photos I had taken from January to June 2005 because my computer had crashed that June, wiping all of the memory off of the computer. I hadn’t had a chance to make prints from any photos from that semester in school, so those photos are forever gone as well. I remember I cried so hard when I realized what had happened–none of those memories will ever be seen again!

Just goes to show that sometimes technology isn’t the greatest thing in the world: with a simple little mistake like what I had done, all those precious photos are gone for good. All that’s left is whatever memories I may have from those periods of time, and over time, those memories fade in my mind.

Maybe I should think about getting all my digital photos printed again. I used to do this last decade when it was still “cool” to make physical prints of digital photos.