Lost Photos
Matt Seinberg

The one thing we always hear about our computers is back up, back up, back up. Well, luckily I do that with all my photos. Last week I put a new micro SD card in my phone, hoping to get better performance and storage with the apps. I moved the apps from the old card onto the phone and then proceeded to format the card without moving all the photos onto my computer, along with all the music I had stored as well.

I panicked.

When I realized my mistake, I panicked, slightly, but realized that I had all those photos stored at Dropbox, Google Photos or on my computer. Luckily, I was correct. The lengthy part was finding the ones I wanted, and then moving them onto the card and creating folders.

Do you have any idea how long this has taken me? I started on Tuesday and it is now Saturday, still, I'm not quite done. I moved hundreds of pictures over and only a few more to go. I totally rebuilt my music library and installed the Samsung Music Player on my S7. This player will show music by artist, genre, tracks and my favourite feature, folders. This is where everything will show and I find it the best feature of this player.

Every time I take a photo, it automatically uploads to Google Photos, and it seems there is no limit on storage space. I probably should have started using that feature a long time ago. Dropbox gives about five gigabytes of space free; that can fill up quickly with photos and audio. Every once in a while, I have to go into my folders and delete stuff. It's sort of like cleaning out your closet, never knowing for sure what you need to throw out.

I can't download from Google Photos directly to my phone.

The one thing I don't like about Google Photos is I can't move photos directly from the app onto the phone. I have to go into my Google account and download them onto my computer; then I can move them to the phone. How time consuming is that? Why can't Google come up with a way to save us the time and energy and let us move them from the app directly to the phone?

With Dropbox, you can download directly from the app to the phone, but again, if you want more storage, you have to pay for it. I prefer the free approach.

Maybe I'll get my own cloud hard drive and store everything there. It has to be easier to keep control of my stuff that way.

I have six external hard drives and each one has a purpose. One is strictly for photos, one is for video, one is for air checks, one is for documents and two are for music. I also have a portable drive that an air check friend sent me with loads of music and many, many air checks. I've explored it, but not in depth.

Lesson learned, well.

I learned my lesson from this little fiasco. Don't delete anything until I've looked at it and decided what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of. I don't want to spend another week on this project.

So, learn from my mistakes and always back your stuff up.