The Facts of Life (part 1)

If you jump off of a tall building, you will fall, hit the ground, and probably die. That's a fact of life. If you ignore this fact, it isn't any less true. Plans that do not take this fact into account will be doomed to failure. Ignorance of this fact will not save you.

I read a story once that presented ten "Facts of Life"  and I found the facts themselves, the discussion of them by the characters and the manner in which characters applied the facts to their own lives to be quite fascinating.

Now whole books could probably be written about the philosophical and practical aspects of TFOL, but that isn't what this blog is about. So how do these facts apply to preservation of family history? Let's take a look.

The first fact, "Life Is Not Fair" refers to how stuff happens. The same stuff doesn't happen to everyone, but stuff does happen. We can wail and gnash our teeth, scream in impotent rage, or we can accept that stuff happens and get on with our lives.

Sometimes we can prepare in advance - like smoke detectors - so that the severity of the stuff is reduced, and sometimes the only advanced preparations that we can make are so that life can resume after the stuff is over.

On the Gulf Coast, the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina erased whole towns, washing away pretty much everything. Most people survived because they heeded the calls to evacuate, but all they had left was whatever meager belongings they had managed to take with them.

If a fire were to break out in your home, you probably wouldn't have any time to save anything and might be left with only the clothes on your back.

So there it is - Life Is Not Fair, and some of that unfairness could come along and completely mess up your life. Are you prepared?

Preserving your family history (photos, videos, etc) might not be all that high on your list of priorities now, but take a moment to imagine how you would feel if your house were to be destroyed and you had done nothing to save any of it. There's no need to protect it all right away - prioritize - preserve the important stuff first.

You'll want to have off-site backups, in the event that the whole house is destroyed. You'll also want to have on-site backups too. After all, stuff happens to computers, hard disks, CDs, DVDs and thumb drives.