I spent the month of October working with a client on what at first seemed like a straight forward project of scanning all her photo prints from her past. Heather was downsizing her life and wanted to rid herself of a massive amount of clutter. On our first phone call, after she answered my ad on Craig’s List, she revealed that I could assist her in a wider goal. Not just her thousand plus prints could be scanned and in some cases restored, but her whole media past could be digitized, consolidated and presented back to her on a neat wallet sized hard drive and tucked into a safe place.
File structure of the completed project ready for handoff.
So the laundry list of things-to-do grew to include:
1000+ photo prints scanned and organized including repair of some dirty and damaged prints
A mystery box of 35mm slides she had never seen that was passed down from her family
Consolidate a box full of external hard drives accumulated over the years with backups of past work and personal data on to a single drive and erase, reformat the old drive for proper disposal
Transfer family image discs and DVD’s to computer files and dispose of the discs ethically
Video transfers - VHS, Hi8 and miniDV family videos over three decades
Erase and sell/recycle two older laptop computers - see image below
Digitized audio cassettes with family oral histories and performances
Dispose/recycle all the above E-waste in a responsible manner including, old camcorders, discs, hard drives, video cassettes, etc.
Four weeks and 1200+ photos, 14 hard drives, 29 optical discs, 9 audio cassettes, 36 video tapes later the job was complete. Each folder organized to include a image of the original tape, hard drive or disc to easily identify where the original source of each file in her computer. The left over waste was separated into three categories. Reuse. recycle or shipped to an ethical e-waste center that would destroy any sensitive information on the tapes, discs and drives.
Now Heather can share the contents of a single hard drive with her son’s as a digital estate. No boxes of “stuff” for her heirs to sort through or just toss out. She is happy, her heirs are really happy and there is a lot less stuff in her material world.
“In my efforts to downsize and simplify, I realized that some of the most important things, the family videos and photos and recordings on cassette tapes, were completely inaccessible because of changing technology - and it took up lots of space and was not holding up to the passage of time. Gregory Fox did not flinch when I dropped off load after load of material to him. His technical expertise and professional background is par none. He went beyond my expectations digitizing everything, from fixing damaged photos and distorted audio. His kindly manner and patience in all interactions drove home how lucky I feel to not have shipped everything off to some company with no communication happening for this very personal project.
It feels like one of the best deals of my life for the price. I have the huge mental relief to know that no natural disaster or technical issue can wipe away this treasure trove. It will be an amazing holiday season this year when I pass along generations of lost memories to my family that Gregory has made easily accessible.”
Heather A.
Laptop erased, reformatted, and reset to factory settings before resale.