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Why do we keep calling scrapbooks 'digital' when they live in a drawer?
I see so many posts here about digitizing every memory, scanning photos, backing up drives. But my strongest memory from 1987 is a physical shoebox under my mom's bed in Akron, filled with ticket stubs and a pressed carnation from prom. That box survived a flood in 2003 and a move across three states. The cloud photos I took in 2015? I can't even find them after two phone upgrades. I'm not saying paper is better, but I wonder if we're losing the weight of a tangible thing you can hold when a screen dies. Anyone else kept something physical on purpose, and does it hit different than a folder on your laptop?
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miles_burns1mo ago
Pressed carnation from prom" got me. I still have a napkin from a diner in 1999 that my friend drew a smiley face on. That thing has moved with me 8 times and I'd grab it before my external hard drive. Meanwhile I took 4,000 photos of my dog in 2018 and somehow they're scattered across three dead phones and a cloud account I forgot the password to. You're right, the flood proof shoebox has more emotional storage than any USB stick I've ever owned. But let's be real, if the cloud crashes tomorrow we're all just gonna be left with a bunch of pizza boxes and concert tees. And honestly? That might be enough.
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