Greetings all. I hope, as you read this, you are well. Here we are, about to enter in the last quarter of 2025, thus the proverbial saying…”where did the time go?”
During the middle of last week, I got a message in my inbox that reads as such:
Okay, sir….. You understand the importance of documentation. I have officially decided that I will be more active in recording videos of time with family and friends. I grew up in a world of living in the moment, and I still live by that, BUT as I get older, I realize how important photos and videos are. Since I’m an nostalgic old gal, I’ll be recording these videos in a VHS filter 🤣 Throw them in a Google Drive folder and give family the link to it
This person knows that I’ve been journaling regularly for the last five years, though (ironically), I missed the last few days, so this prompted the beginning of a dialog on the importance of documenting/preservation. We ended up discussing the approaches I’ve taken and made some suggestions she may want to consider. One of things this she mentioned was, while photos are great, video is better, not just because of the visual, but the audio that often accompanies it, specifically the ability to hear one’s voice. I definitely agree with her (as I’m sure you do as well). The first item that came to mind that supports (for me) this aspect greatly is this photo below of a cassette tape…note the timeframe written on it. It mostly includes a family gathering during Christmas time and has the voice of my mom who passed away a year later when I was only 8 years old. You can imagine what it would be like to hear your Mom’s voice so many years later because, at the age of 8, how many really remember much of any relationship with their loved ones?
I still have this cassette, and have transferred the contents to DVD, external hard drive, and minidisc for preservation. As long as I can remember, I’ve been an archivist, especially to digital format, of fragile items such as cassette and video tape, photographs, etc, for longevity and preservation. Back in the day, the recoding devices and mediums LONG before the mobile phone that were of use for me were primarily cassette tape, followed by VHS for video. It was until recently that still owned a Sony 8mm camcorder I bought in the early-mid 1990s that I used to record tons of family video onward. My daughter was born in 1996 and I had just got my first mobile phone (which I still have) around that time, upgrading from a pager. From the looks of the phone, you can clearly see recording video wasn’t EVEN an option.
I’ve recorded a lot of VHS and 8mm video tape content of all kinds (wedding day, movies, TV concerts, daily family life, vacations, etc) to DVD thanks to a VHS-to DVD recorder my cousin gifted me with decades ago, which still works like a charm. I have hard drives of scanned photos and video spanning 30 years easily and I’m glad I took the effort to do so simply because tape can be so easily damaged if not well kept in many ways. I’ve chosen not to back up any of this content to the cloud only because not everyone’s content needs to sit on someone’s remote server that you have no access to. I have enough devices (since I baby a lot of my tech, old and new) that this content can be viewed and heard by family long after I’m gone, and means a lot to me.
In any event, thanks for the read.
…oceans of rhythm, Fresh.
