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Posted on 01/14/2026 10:15:54 AM PST by fidelis
If you used a digital camera in the early 2000s, there's a good chance whole chapters of your life have been erased. A generation of photos has vanished on broken hard drives and defunct websites.
For my 40th birthday, I asked my friends and family members for one gift: pictures of me in my early 20s. My own photo collection from that era – roughly 2005-2010 – is devastatingly scarce. There's a blank space somewhere between my albums of printed college photos and my Dropbox folder of early motherhood snapshots. All I could find from those years was a handful of low-res pictures of me in a bar doing something weird with my hands.
As for the rest? Long gone, thanks to a dead laptop, defunct email and social media accounts and a sea of tiny memory cards and USB drives lost in the shuffle of multiple cross-country moves. It's like my memories were nothing more than a dream.
It turns out I'm not alone. In the early 2000s, the world made a sudden and dramatic transition from film to digital photography, but it took a while before we landed on easy, reliable storage for all those new files. Today your smartphone can zap back-ups of your photos to the cloud the second you take them. A lot of pictures captured during that first wave of digital cameras aren't so lucky. As people hopped from one device to another and digital services rose and fell, untold millions of photos vanished along the way.
There's a black hole in the photographic record that spans across our entire society. If you had a digital camera back then, there's a good chance many of your photos were lost when you stopped using it...
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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3-2-1
There are programs that can heal the remaining files, if enough of each can be found.
On hard drives, the magnetic information is mostly just weaker. If the sector is reread 4-6 times, it can take what is gathered and make a new file that is complete.
This is one such program, from a great guy I used to read, Steve Gibson:
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
Over the last year and a half, my sister and I have been doing family genealogy work, including collecting old photographs (either prints or digital images of such). It has occupied far more time (especially the genealogy part) than I ever anticipated, but we have come up with a wide variety of photos that most in the family had never seen. Each branch of the family had their own photos to contribute.
One thing that I would recommend for someone doing this sort of thing: Interview (and video if possible) older members of the family. A lot of family history disappears completely when the older family members die. I was blessed to have three extended videos of my mother, made between 2005 and 2010, telling about her early years and family history. Some unexpected photos can sometimes be found in distant corners of the family group, but once memories are gone, they are gone forever.
“This happened to me. The laptop I used in the 1990’s early 2000’s contained digital copies of my few childhood photos, and scores of other historic photos scraped up from other family members, not to mention more recent family photos and hobby photography. After that laptop crashed, except for many of my hobby photographs cached on flckr, they are probably gone forever.”
In addition to cloud backups, I have a portable solid state drive that I use to back up my files once a month.
My brother and sis have copies of all the old family photos I scanned in about 20 years ago.
We had a flood in a storage unit when we were in the middle of a move. One of the movers accidentally took the contents of a basement closet over to that unit. We didn’t know until we went to go through the contents in the unit that a couple of shoeboxes filled with printed photos were over there, and not taken to the new home. They were totally ruined. There were about 15 years of photos that we lost, from before we were married to the births of our three kids, and their growing up years. I cried for days.
My family had a sort of solution. Back in those days you could get duplicate prints, so I had sent some to my parents and siblings. We made new copies from anything they had. So, we do have *some* of what we lost, but we did lose a lot that was never shared or had duplicates of. Memories only in our brains.
My program is this:
BlueCon 23:
https://www.oo-software.com/en/oo-bluecon-disaster-recovery-for-companies
If you sign up for occasional sales emails, you can buy that for under $100, like I have, twice. They had that promo until a couple days ago.
Also, they have a file / picture recovery program, which I also have, in addition to Spinrite from Steve Gibson, called Disk Recovery.
Now, 79 years old, l can only look back and wish.
I need to document my recollections of my discussions of the now departed.
Another way to lose the important photos on your phone is to not mark them, file/categorize them, or get hard copies of them, and they just keep getting pushed back into the ever growing 1000s of other photos until, in effect, they are lost.
What are some reliable ways to store digital photos?
Cloud backup
Copies on multiple drives at different physical locations
Print physical copies
Any other options?
One thing that I would recommend for someone doing this sort of thing: Interview (and video if possible) older members of the family. A lot of family history disappears completely when the older family members die. I was blessed to have three extended videos of my mother, made between 2005 and 2010, telling about her early years and family history. Some unexpected photos can sometimes be found in distant corners of the family group, but once memories are gone, they are gone forever.
This mirrors my experience exactly (except for the videos. How I wish I had some like that for my elders!). It was during our enthusiasm of genealogy research that we were able to garner the old photos that we did, getting our extended family involved who also became enthusiastic until our leads started petering out. We tried interviewing our older relatives, but by then most of them were either gone, or their memories had gotten bad, or they were not interested. My advice to others is don't wait until it's too late.
One of the great lies of technology.
Standards and formats change every 10-15 years. It’s in the corporate-tech-oligarch interest that you be forced to update and change every time.
Same thing happened with the music you bought which has gone from CD to DVD, to MP3 to cloud
Now its lifetime subscription to storage services.
You will own nothing, and be happy.
Mine are all on CD’s, hard drives, floppies and photo paper prints redundancy backup 4x
Kodachrome film was officially discontinued by Kodak in June 2009, ending its 74-year run, with the final processing of the last rolls by Dwayne’s Photo in late 2010, marking the end of the specialized K-14 chemical process for color development. At least I still have some of those photos. Somewhere.
There are negative readers that could be helpful.
REFERENCE BUMP - I’VE GOT LOTS OF DRIVES AND READERS - SOME WON’T SPIN UP BUT I’VE BACKED UP SEVERAL TO 5 TERABYTE DRIVES - THANKS FOR LINK!
Time to finish the job. 😊👍😎
I have been backing up those photos to hard drives for decades. Got em all. What I need is content off some 8mm tapes.
This is why you always backup your important docs. I keep old photos on old hard drives in a drawer and now on USB sticks. Also some CDROMS. I probably have 10 backups of everything. You can never have too many.
Something similar happened with my family. When we were young, our family was always taking pictures, especially my Dad. We must have hundreds of them stored away in family albums. When my parents broke up, they put all their stuff in a storage unit, including the pictures. After a while, they stopped making the payments on the unit and everything was lost, including all the pictures. I can still see many of them in my memory, but they are gone.
Just like they say, during a fire grab your pictures if you can, never leave your family pictures behind. They are irreplaceable.
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