PLEASE back up your digital photograph collection now

[Laura032004]

My DH has had his laptop stolen. All of our family photographs were on there from 8mnths pg to DS being about 10 months old. We've lost his birth, his first christmas, first crawl.....
I know we should have backed them up. Tried a few times, but there were too many to fit on disks, so always gave up, to do it another time...
I am absolutely devastated. I've been in tears most of the day. I'm trying to track down any photos that other people have taken of him, but neither of our parents take many pictures, they relied on getting copies of ours. I take literally hundreds & hundreds of them. I've only ever had 100 developed, and hardly any with me on as I didn't like the way I looked in the photos, and they were always on the laptop to look at.
I'm sure lots of other people are the same, and although a laptop getting stolen is probably something we should have anticipated, computers can 'die' or even be stolen in a burglary.
So, learn from my lesson, and back them up soon.

Wow, Laura, so sorry to hear this. I will show your message to DH tonite.

thats so sad,

we only just got round to printing opurs off the computer from DS1 being 10 months plus(hes 2.5 now!)

Oh Laura I'm so sorry to hear this. backing up photos is not hard to do. I'm no computer wizard but it is one thing I've learnt how to do. If I was to rely on DH it just wouldn't be done. I also have them on PC but have a drawer of indexed CDs. Also there is a infrared labelling kit available (ask the police) to put your post code and house number on any valuables eg electrical gear, bikes, sports kit etc so that if they are stolen 1)if recovered by the police can be returned to the owners faster and 2) if the thieves find it are less likely to get rid of it for money - but that may mean dumping . I know this isn't going to cheer you up at all, but when you get your next laptop, or get this one returned, please tag it with your data.

Something I have never even thought about, thankyou for the reminder and I feel for you .

I backed mine up not long ago - onto about 5 disks! Well, 10 actually because I made 2 copies for safety.

I once had my bag stolen which had 2 reels of undeveloped film in it from DS2s first Christmas so I know how you feel

Hi L,

That's a very long period of time to have lost phots from. It sounds that, like me, you enjoyed taking lots of baby pictures. How very very sad. It might be worth keeping an eye on e-bay and loot or local papers etc. for someone trying to offload it. Dunno if contacting the local paper might help with a 'lost' story IYSWIM, just in case the w*nker thief has a heart...

I'm going to run a back up today because, like you, I haven't.

If you e-mailed shots to people from the laptop and dh's e-mail service provider (his IT people ???) run IMAP servers instead of POP-3 servers you might have a backup of your sent items folder IYSWIM.

Thanks for your suggestions hub, but we've never used dh's laptop on the internet, so none of them were ever emailed

We had produced a disk for my MIL to get some photos developed from, so hopefully that will turn up and we will have a few on disk.

Luckily in Jan we got a new computer, and all since then are on there.

I'm thinking about ringing the paper. DH was on a trip with work, and it was stolen from a pile of luggage that had been taken off of the coach ready to go into the hotel. Sadly it's not even a good laptop, the screen had a faulty connection and was always flickering, and it's two years old.

Anyone know the local paper in Ayr? (if that's how you spell it)

Keep remembering photos that were on it - a cruise that we went on with dh's nan & mum, shortly before she died earlier this year, dh's best friends wedding where he was the best man, so many things that meant so much. All the little video clips we'd taken with the camera. Have to stop thinking about it for a while.

Try contacting them they are a sister paper of our local paper

ayrshire post

Thanks for those details seb1. Have sent them an email, so fingers crossed.

We had a video camera stolen about a year ago in a break in at dh's business. It turned up as part of a haul several months later and the police traced it back to me. don't lose all hope xx

What an awful thing to happen. Do your relatives still have copies of some of the pictures? Did you upload any to Photobox, picturetrail etc?

I have just backed-up my album to disc after reading your first post.

How distressing! We use an online backup service to backup all our photos (they are therefore held on an external server) as dh is a bit of an amateur photographer and we have loads. It runs a backup each evening (essential for us as our photos are added to each day).
backupmystuff.co.uk

We've got a few photos left - ones that my parents took on their camera, but usually I got mine out and said to them not to bother as my camera took much better pictures

Thankfully, the disc that we made to get some developed has now turned up, so we have some photos from when ds was first born.

The paper that seb1 has suggested are going to run a story on it, so you never know, it may yet turn up. Embarrassed to admit it, but I don't know if it had our name / address on it. It was DH's, and so not something I ever thought of.

Will have to look for one of those special invisible pens. Bet E-bay has them!

I am about to back ours up NOW!
Sorry to hear you lost so much x

Well, I've now backed up all the pictures on my new computer. It was so easy.... why didn't I do it earlier

Laura, story is in the paper, hope you get something back

Laura, I really feel for you, I would be absolutely devasted if that happenned to us.

Am going to back-up tomorrow.

Good luck with the article in the paper.