For Posterity: Preserving Precious Views of the Past

The hard drive crashes, the memory card disappears, the phone falls into the bathtub, the basement floods. A thousand different scenarios, but the grim results are the same: You’ve lost all your pictures. Don’t let this happen to you. Even if you’re not a techie, you can back up the snapshots of your life in just five minutes

Save Those Memories

It was a devastating loss that happened in the blink of an eye. On the last day of a family vacation in Israel, a friend of mine was walking through Jerusalem’s central bus station. Someone bumped into her husband and his iPhone suddenly disappeared from his back pocket.

It took them a while even to catch on. By the time they opened the Find My iPhone app on her iPad, the phone had already made it to Holon. (They even had an exact address on HaGat Street.)

“The actual phone was old, and we didn’t care much about it,” she recalls. “But we were frantic about the lost photos — so many irreplaceable shots from our once-in-a-lifetime trip. Since the phone was on power-saving mode throughout our trip, nothing had been backed up.”

They immediately contacted the police. In a combination of broken Hebrew and English, they explained their dire predicament and the value of their precious photos. They even provided the exact address of the iPhone thief.