How To Better Digitize & Backup Your Life

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Many people believe that digitizing our lives is a mistake, that having everything online and never keeping physical backups will one day bite us. Sure, it's good to have both physical and digital goods, be that physical media, the preservation of memories, passwords written down rather than saved in your online storage, and getting out of the house, away from social media, and back to a more direct way of living as much as possible.

However, it's also true to say that if the internet somehow goes down worldwide, we have much bigger problems than worrying about a few files we lost. For this reason, digitizing your life is not necessarily a great moral sin, rather just an added convenience in helping you unlock the quality of your life a little more. Don't feel bad about it – it's just the way of the world.

For those looking to digitize and backup their life for convenience and longevity sake, it can be interesting to know what options are on the table and how they might even compare to ten years ago. In this post, we'll discuss all of that and more:

Cloud Storage
Curating cloud storage on all of your apps and devices means that when you have something to upload, it can auto-connect to your online storage and do so in encrypted form. This will mean that if you need to bring up a photo on your mobile device in order to show your parent or grandparent at a moment's notice, it can be easily done, and if one device dies then you'll still have access to the content through your cloud.

Cloud storage can also work in tandem with both your day to day professional planning as well as your personal life, meaning that no matter what, you'll have access to every file and folder you work on or create until you choose to delete them. It's not hard to see the true value this provides.

Photo Restoration & Colorization
With services that allow you to colorize photo albums, you can keep even your most precious analog memories to hand and potentially pass them down to your family members in the best possible light. Then, if scanned properly, these photographs can easily be shared throughout your family and beyond, allowing you to preserve both copies with care. This doubles the chance that if you lose one, you'll at least have a backup to enjoy. After all, your family memories and history are too important to lose on a whim.

Security On All Accounts
Cloud storage is much harder to penetrate than it is when having your possessions stolen in ‘the real world', as strange as this sounds. With encryption, two-factor authentication, code backups, and biometric login data, you can ensure that it's only you who will ever have access to certain accounts going forward.

Moreover, now services are starting to add ‘legacy contact' options, which basically means that if you pass away, those you trust will be able to access your accounts and manage them as you wish, be that downloading all of the data you found fit to save and closing the account, or finding the artwork, notes and even business material you had saved. This way, you can pass on your work and items you appreciated. It's not hard to see the kind of value this can bring.

Singular Platforms For Convenience
You may have heard talk of an ‘ecosystem of tech' in which all of your provisions are given by one platform and that you use that to curate all of your digital ‘goods' so to speak. This can be a good idea, but if you hope to do this in greater form, it's important to read into which platform is best for your needs.

For instance, consider some of the major players here – Google, Apple, Microsoft and more. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Google has a fantastic array of services for instance, but some are more popular than others. Their Stadia gaming platform is considered quite impotent at the moment, for instance and needs further work to get into an appropriate place.

Apple and Microsoft are considered heralds of the computing market, with the latter offering an array of business web service solutions worth looking at should you wish to comprise your own small enterprise or business one day.

Note Taking Apps
So far we've discussed a range of grand ideals and efforts you can use in order to make the computer work for you, but reminders and notes are far and above the most convenient from day to day. With apps like Evernote or simply using the apps of your phone already, it can be worthwhile to jot your thoughts to remember shopping items, and to practice a message before you send it far and away from accidentally hitting that green button.

Reminders can also be set by setting up the AI voice on your phone, often dictated by ‘Hey Siri, Alexa, or Hey Google' variants. This may also provide you the kind of utility that you'll miss when you're gone, such as by saying ‘Hey Siri, define X' while reading a book with relatively archaic language. In the long run, it's the notes that help us live day to day with further ease.

Payment Processors & Platforms
A great payment processor just makes life easier, and it can prevent the need to carry around cash or cards with you. Google Pay and Apple Pay are great examples of this, but they're hardly the only two worth considering.

This way, when in a store, you can easily bring your phone up to the card reader and immediately pay for something. No counting change, no chance of your wallet being stolen, and immediate encrypted details available for your perusal. It does make a difference.

With this advice, we hope you can more readily digitize and backup your life in the best possible context going forward.