The Digital Insider

Right off the bat here, I must admit that I have never been involved in any kind of evacuation. A few earthquakes and some school drills are about all I’ve attended. When it comes to fires, tornadoes, hurricanes or even an alien invasion I couldn’t even imagine the thoughts that run through a homeowners head. Having just a few minutes to get yourself, your family, and anything else you may find important out and on the move has got to be tough. What items do you take? What do you leave behind? What types of questions do you ask yourself? Do you really get the time to ask these questions?

Recently we here at ScanDigital have been receiving materials from those who have gone through just that. As I’m sure you know by now, Southern California has been fighting wildfires from Santa Barbara all the way down to the Mexican border. Thousands of homes have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the devastation. The story we are hearing first hand here every day is that of families gathering up whatever they can, clothes, heirlooms, and pictures and seeking shelter. The luckier ones have been able return to their homes and are working to return everything with minimal effort.

Having started as part of the ScanDigital team only weeks before this tragedy, I’ve realized in these dangerous evacuation situations it simply makes sense eliminate the burden of trying to rescue your photos by having them preserved and digitized in advanced. One of my favorite parts of our service is that the images are backed up to our offsite, secure servers, meaning our customers do not even need to worry about grabbing their CD/DVD in an unforeseen tragedy. If leaving pictures behind allows for more time to gather other items that can’t be replaced, I say save those. Printing out photos later just makes sense. It’s a problem one could worry about after all the other hassles are squared away. I like to think that the work I am doing provides a bit of the safety and piece of mind to our customers who know their photographs are safe offsite and online, hopefully this helps people during times like these.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 12:54 pm and is filed under California Wildfires, ScanDigital, business, digital photography, photo scanning, photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.