I wouldn’t want to lose it

Would you also find it terrible if your laptop got stolen? Or if it suddenly stopped working? I would. Not so much because I would have to buy a new one (I already had my eye on the latest MacBook Pro), but because of all the history I would lose. The photos and videos that can’t be replaced. I’m just afraid that along the way, I’ve already lost some things, despite all the cybersecurity and information security protocols I follow.

At least you don’t lose photo albums. I know exactly which cabinet at my parents’ house holds all the photo books. They are brought out every now and then, and then they go back to the same place. I can specifically look for that one photo where I’m 5 years old and so angry that my cheeks are the color of an eggplant, or where I’m with my best friends from elementary school, that photo just after my mother removed the flowerpot from my head to show my new haircut (after she had put a band-aid on my ear).

I know the photos, I know exactly what they look like, and if I start talking to my mother or brother about the eggplant photo, they know what I’m talking about, what the photo looks like, which book it’s in, and roughly on which page. It’s funny, we laugh about it, and sometimes it’s nice to actually look at the photo again.

On my laptop, it’s the opposite world. There are folders with names like “photos” and “New folder” and “IMG_0909.” Because that seemed logical at the time. I think. And these are then hidden in overarching folders named “backup” followed by a date. Backups of laptops that had backups of earlier laptops. All very organized.

I have no idea what beautiful pictures you might find if you open the folders. They contain thousands of photos, transferred from cameras and phones and other laptops of mine or others. If I randomly click on some, I find pictures where I don’t recognize anything, where I’m in the photo but have no idea what’s going on, or where I vaguely remember what I wanted to photograph but can’t tell you who the people are.

There are also all sorts of variations of those photos, because why be frugal with those MBs you can reuse, right? Variations with a slightly different smile, blurry and shaky variations, variations where I can’t really tell the difference. The collection has never been cleaned up, and no selection has ever been made, as you would do for a physical photo album.

So, I almost never look at them. I can’t say with a straight face that I’ve never lost photos. Maybe I accidentally deleted a backup once, or never made a backup. I do know that I can never find what I’m looking for. That’s also a form of losing.