Friday, April 22, 2011

Organizing #2

In February, IHeartOrganizing brought on another huge challenge.  Organizing photos!  (can't you just hear the horror music playing when you read that line, I can)

I don't have any photos of this project.  But I do have my story...

One of the first tasks was to delete all unnecessary photos, something I was in desperate need of doing.  I spent hours, (and I'm not kidding, HOURS) deleting duplicate photos, blurry photos, bad photos, and just worthless photos.  Because I deleted so many photos, I was only a little shocked when I went to empty my recylcing bin and it said it was deleting over 7,000 photos.

Being as I was in ultra-organizing mode, I deciding to then de-fragment my computer.  Something I have only done at one other point in my entire life.  Somthing I never ever do.  What in the world possessed me to think it was a good idea right then?!  Because later that night, I went to look for a photo on my computer.  And every single photo was gone.  Absolutely gone.  Deleted, Cleared from Recylcing, De-fragmented away, Gone.

I was a little bit in freak-out mode, I will admit.  I really only cared about my honeymoon photos.  I hadn't really done anything else amazing that year, and I still have the CDs with the wedding photos on them.  Malachi was calling his computer genius friend who agreed to rehab my computer to the best of his ability (this took a few days).  Luckily, during those few days, I checked my external hard drive and hugged myself as I realized I had backed up all of my photos in early December.  Honeymoon SAVED!  Malachi's friend was able to recover a few photos, but none that I didn't already have on the external hard drive.  So christmas, and january and part of february were gone.  But see, I have this thing called a blog, so I went back and stole photos from my past posts.  So truly, I really ended up with most of those 7,000 pictures safe and sound.  Only a few are gone forever.  But I think it was a fair trade and a lesson learned.

So once all that was over, I then went to my external hard drive and cleaned that out.  I had so many duplicates on there, and a ton of damaged files that were not worth keeping.
And after all of that deleting, I organized all of my photos onto my external hard drive by years and in each year folder I have 12 month folders.

So what I am doing now is keeping a 2011 folder on my computer and deleting bad photos right from the start and organizing them by month, right from the start.

Yesterday I mentioned an external hard drive in my safe deposit box.  Here is why I have one.
Last year I read a blog post about this woman.  She and her family had recently rennovated a house to make it into their dream home.  Then one night her house burned down and they lost everything.  A common story to hear, right?  What got to me were two things. 

First, she described how there was no time to grab any belongings.  Her entire house burned down in less than 30 minutes.  THIRTY MINUTES!  I can't even start a campfire in a decent amount of time.  So all they had time to grab were the kids and the animals.  photos, computers...all gone.

Second, the fire was started from their dishwasher!  I feel like I take good precautions in unplugging things, turning things off.  But a dishwasher?  I would have never imagined that causing my house to burn down. 

What this lady said in her blog post was a list of preparations to make, just in case a fire ever happens to any of the rest of us.  And she mentioned keeping your photos safe somewhere besides your computer.  I have always kept a backup on my external hard drive, as I've mentioned several times already.  But my hard drive sits nicely in my house, fair game for fire.  So I realized that, with photos being so precious to me, I needed a place off site. 

There are safe deposit box options, and online storage places.  But I'm cheap, and not made of money.  So I invented a free version for myself.  Which is what I don't want to share on my blog, but I'm sure if you guys get creative (and you care to do this), you will find a way that works for you.

So now I have my photos backed up on my external hard drive, and once a year (unless a big event happens that year), I transfer my year folder to my offsite hard drive.  I can now rest easy.

As for non-digital photos, I bought a couple of photo boxes.  A small one for normal size photos, and a large one for portraits and drawings.

In this process, I have also begun organizing all of my music on my computer and I plan to have a similar system with the music, not that it is really all that important, but it will be nice to have it organized at least on the hard drive here at home.

Also I have a lot of document files to sort through.  I just got Word on my computer last month, so I can finally open half of the documents!

Sorry this post was so ridiculously long, and I didn't even give you a photo to look at!  Thanks for reading!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

woah. definately need to get an external hard drive! and putting pictures on it is such a great idea! i starting the picture purge but like you said, it takes hours! i have my folders made up and organized... :) so excited that you are keeping up with those projects! i love reading about your progress!

Taumi said...

so similar to my freak-out moment when my hard drive crashed and burned. And I only lost about three months too...was so relieved about that because originally I thought it was 6. I have everything on a back up external too but it is also next to my computer. My biggest fear is someone breaking in and just grabbing all of it. That would be horrible. Good idea with an offsite one. I could keep one at my mom's.

Miriam said...

I've saved quite a bit on my external hard drive, but i have so many junk photos I will never look at again. I don't think I have the discipline right now to go through them, but I think I need to find that discipline somewhere just in case something like that happens to me...