it's your legacy... Entrustet HIWI Blog

My Grandparents loved to travel. My grandfather was a university professor and was lucky enough to be able to teach his class in Europe two different times during his life. He brought his entire family for two six month periods, allowing them to experience Europe as a family. These European teaching excursions caused my Grandparents to be bitten by the travel bug. After they both retired, they traveled all over the globe, going to Kenya, Japan, China, Australia, pretty much all of Europe and countless places in North America. Along the way, they took huge volumes of pictures.

In their day, people took pictures and then converted them to slides so that they could share the photos with their friends and families. Slides were the easiest way to organize, share and distribute photos for people of their generation. When I was growing up, I can remember being mesmerized by my Grandma going through all of her slides from their trips to far away, exotic places. When I was in kindergarten, my Grandma came to my class to show slides and talk about her recent trip to China. As I got older, I continued to love looking at her slides from their trips, especially the slides from their trips to Africa, China and Portugal. It was great and some of my best memories are of us looking at slides in a personal slide viewer , talking about the places she had been. I know that these memories made me catch the travel bug; I know that I want to visit as many different places as I can during my lifetime.

When she passed away, I inherited all of her slides and photos from her travels around the world. The slides are one of my favorite things that remind me of her. I still have them in huge boxes at my parents house and pull out random slides from time to time when I go home for a visit. At some point I am going to digitize them so that I will have them in a medium that I can look at without the aide of a slide viewer.

As I’ve traveled around Europe, I’ve taken numerous photos. Almost all of them have been taken on a digital camera, and those that weren’t, were scanned into digital formats when I returned. If I ever have children, I want to be able to pass my photos to them, in the same way my Grandma passed her slides to me. But here’s the problem: how will I make sure that people know where my travel photos are located if I die, especially if I die suddenly? I am constantly adding new photos to my collection and storing them in different places. How will I know that my digital photos are safe so that my family will be able to enjoy them as much as I enjoyed my Grandma’s slides?

These questions led me to Entrustet. I believe that it is important to preserve digital photos so that the next generation can see where their family came from, so Jesse and I have worked to create a system that will allow you to make sure that it happens. I back up all of my photos using Mozy.com’s automated backup and include my Mozy account information in my Entrustet account. When I die, I want my brother to have access to my photos from my world travels so that he can share them with the rest of my family. As I get older, I may change my who gets access to my photos, but right now, I think that my brother is the best choice.