How Precious Are Your Pictures?

If your house was on fire, and your family and pets were safe, but you could only carry one thing out of the house before it burnt to the ground, what would it be?

Your wedding album?

Your child's baby album?

What about your computer?

In our digital age, it's more common to snap a picture on a digital camera, download it your computer, and upload it to a Facebook photo album, rather than use real film, have real prints made, and keep them in a real photo album. If it's a photo that you're particularly fond if, you might print it out with your digital photo printer, on digital photo paper and frame it or place it in a scrapbook or photo album.

But, what happens to the pictures that you only "sort of" like. Maybe they're pictures of your child, not good enough for framing but worth keeping nonetheless.

Personally, I learned several months ago that if I want one great picture of my daughter, I need to take at least twelve pictures, and HOPE that in at least one of them she is smiling, looking at the camera, and doesn't have a booger on her face. (And, sometimes the booger shot IS the best shot.)

What happens to all of those extra pictures? Typically, (at least, in my case) they end up sitting on the computer, relegated to folder somewhere on my hard drive, only to be called on once every few days for a cameo appearance on a screen saver. I love all of my pictures of my daughter, even if they aren't all the "chosen ones" that get prominently displayed somewhere in my house.

So, if my house were burning and I could only grab one thing, it would be my computer, because my computer is essentially my collective wedding album, baby book, and collection of home movies.

The reason I bring this all up is because recently I was the victim of a hacker/virus (I'm still not sure which, but it's a matter of another rant entirely) that threatened the security of all of my pictures and videos on my computer. Some time last week someone, or something, cracked the user names and passwords of my Facebook profile, email, and worst of all: my private family website that essentially acts as my daughters online baby book, complete with photos, videos, stories, and events, as well as comments from all of my family ala Facebook (but without the public profile.)

In addition to locking me out of my Facebook, email, and family site, my "friend" managed to delete my wife's profile from the family site, so that when I logged in as her, thinking I could outwit the hacker/virus, the website appeared missing, causing me to panic and think that they had managed to delete it. I couldn't believe that someone had essentially deleted my daughter's baby book!

I was devastated and worked diligently over the next few days to reach someone at the website's host to get access again. Luckily, as I found out from friends and family who could still access the site that it was still there, I was just not in control of it, a semi-relief. However, it appeared that "I" (or rather the person pretending to be me) had logged in several times since the real me had been locked out. A day later, I got back in, changed my password, deleted my old profile and created a new one, to lock out my impersonator.

Since I couldn't rule out the fact that this had all happened because of a virus, which could potentially reap far worse damage to everything on my hard drive, I worked quickly to backup the (literally) thousands of pictures and videos on my computer, format the computer, and reload Windows to prevent this from happening again, or worse: allowing a virus to cause any harm to my most precious digital possessions.

Luckily, at least as of today, the reload seems to have worked and my "friend" has not been able to access any of my accounts since then. But, the fear that some unscrupulous hacker or simple virus could have wiped out the photo record of my daughter's first year of life has left me shaken.

So, I offer my story as a cautionary tale to all parents who might have the same habits as myself; storing their most precious moments and memories on something so easily accessed by someone willing to try hard enough. If you haven't done so already, backup your digital photographs and videos, print them out, or invest in an external hard drive or some other place to keep them safe from their would-be online attackers.

If your photos and videos of your child are precious to you, do everything you can to keep them safe!