it's your legacy... Entrustet HIWI Blog

We’ve focused most of our attention on the blog around how to transfer and delete online accounts like Facebook, Gmail, YouTube and World of Warcraft, but online accounts are only half of the equation.  The other half is files stored on your computer or in the cloud like business documents, digital family photos and other files on your computer that you’d like to transfer to the next generation.

According to a Toshiba survey called Consumer Viewpoints on Protecting Digital Memories (pdf download), the majority of young people list a computer crash as their second biggest fear, after someone breaking into their home.  In the same survey 78% of women said that digital files like family photos and recipes are “priceless” and that they are concerned with how to make sure that these family memories are passed on to the next generation.  The survey describes women as the “chief memory officers” of today’s families because women feel strongly about making sure digital family heirlooms are passed on to the next generation and are not lost because of a computer crash or the heirs inability to find the digital versions after they pass away.  It is clear that these women are High Internet Worth Individuals, or as we like to call them, HIWIs.

The survey results ring true to me because my Mom is definitely my family’s Chief Memory Officer.  She spent over two years scanning all of our family photos so that they would be preserved for my brother and me.  She scanned pictures of my grandparents, great grandparents and relatives I had never really known.  She also scanned all of our physical family photos of my brother and me growing up.  We even taught her how to import all of the pictures to Picasa so that their id engine could automatically tag all of us using facial recognition software.  Next, she took the time to create captions on most of the pictures, so that future generations will be able to know more about family history.

In the Toshiba survey, 89% of respondents said that they believed that backing up their digital memories was important, but only a small percentage has actually gone ahead and backed up their hard drive.  My Mom used to be in that 89% until I introduced her to Mozy.  She used Mozy’s automated backup the save all of our family’s digital photos so that if anything happened to the computer, they would be safe.  It was lucky that she did, because the laptop that she had been using for scanning photos got infected with a virus and crashed.  The pictures would have been lost if not for Mozy.  My Mom has since added her Mozy account to her Account Guardian so that my brother and I will be able to access all of our family photos when she dies (hopefully not for a really long time!).

I’ve been a Mozy fan for three years now, so when it came time to help Entrustet users protect their digital memories like family photos, it was only natural that we started to recommend Mozy.  One of the steps in the Account Guardian allows you to sign up for Mozy with a 15% discount.  We believe that even if you are not worried about your digital legacy, you should have Mozy on your computers to prevent against crashes and viruses.  If you are interested in protecting your family’s digital memories, we suggest using Mozy to backup your files and then add Mozy to your Entrustet account so that your heirs will have access to your priceless memories.  In a recent acticle about us Mashable’s Brenna Ehrlic recommended that people use Mozy because “You can then store any files on the site via Mozy, which seems like a great option even if you’re not expecting to kick it any time soon.”

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adding family photos to wills · Entrustet · mozy