Family Archives

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Safer at Home – Day Eleven

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April 13, 2020

We announced our Savers of the Family Archives sale today. Big discounts are available on all the services we offer. This sale, which runs until the end of April, highlights a benefit that isn’t discussed as much as it probably should. Namely, we can save people tons of space.

Cans of film, boxes of videotapes, whole shelves filled with photo albums or slide carousels all take up room. Early in our marriage, I asked my wife a question to start a conversation that I think most people have at some point. “If there were a fire in the house, what one thing do you want me to grab on my way out?” Her answer was immediate: “My photos.”

So I took a look around in order to come up with a plan to sweep through the house collecting all the family photos she has displayed in every room. It was not going to be an easy task at any time but during an inferno it was going to be near impossible. Still, my bride asked me to make sure I saved her photos so I was committed to try.

Until I discovered that not all her photos are on display. In our master bedroom closet sits a six foot cedar chest packed to the brim with photo album after photo album. It must weigh 300 pounds. So I went to my wife and said, “Bad news, hon. I’m going to be going up in flames with the house.”

Having a digital backup of one’s family history – stored on a hard drive that can be kept in a safe deposit box or easily carried in one hand – eliminates the need for self-sacrifice, and insures that the irreplaceable memories of life can always be saved to be re-lived and enjoyed another day.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.

Natural Enemies

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Oil vs Water.

Captain Kirk vs Khan.

Your videotapes or film vs a flood or hurricane.

Some things will never go together.

With hurricane season upon us, we should ask ourselves what, among our possessions, do we want to prioritize should evacuation become necessary? We accumulate a lot of things over a lifetime. What among them could not be replaced should they be damaged by natural forces?

We can build or buy another house, We can buy or lease another car. We can replace most things. We cannot replace two things: The lives of the ones we love; and the memories we have recorded over time. Those two things, which for most of us represent all that is of primary importance in our lives, are irreplaceable.

Most will put the preservation of life as paramount on the “what to save” list. Most of us will also put photo albums, videotape collections, home movies, etc. as a close second. But the reality is… when disaster strikes, there won’t be time to drag 200 pounds of photos, slides, videos, film, etc out of the house. We’d be risking our primary goal (the saving of life) to try to save our secondary goal (the saving of our recorded memories.) As I told my wife, who pointed to a 6 foot cedar chest filled to the brim with slides and photos when I asked her what I should save in case of a fire, “You do realize that this means I’ll be going up with the house…”

There is a better way. We have been blessed to have grown up in an age that allowed us to capture key moments on film or video and to be able to play them back in years to come in order to bring those memories into focus. But the media that was used when we were growing up had limitations – among them the amount of space they took up.

A 1 terabyte hard drive can hold a family’s entire picture history, film history, AND videotape history. And it can fit into someone’s back pocket, allowing the family to save other items in an emergency, like Aunt Sally’s tri-colored comforter or Grandma Betty’s collection of handmade tea cozies.

The reality is this. We don’t know when or if a disaster will strike. But the time to take action is before it arrives. Home Video Studio has a Savers of the Family Archives service that will scan or transfer your precious memories and deliver them back to you on a digital device that can be stored in a safe deposit box or up in the cloud. Should anything ever happen to your original memories, you can rest assured that your digital backup can replicate those memories – sometimes in a better condition than when we first got them.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.