You ever stop to think about what you would lose if your house burned to the ground? Though there are many things that are stored in the house, most things can be replaced and paid for through fire insurance money. However, a few things cannot be replaced as easily and therefore, care must be taken to protect them.

You may have thought of something irreplaceable in your house right now, but for me, that something is the massive photo collection that our family has.

We've got literally thousands of family photos dating back more than 30 years now. Pictures of Janice and I as babies, pictures of the countless family vacations that we took each summer with my grandparents. For many of these memories, they exist only in a single paper photo. No doubles, no negatives. If a photo was destroyed, it would be destroyed forever. For me, the photos are the primary memory remaining of my grandpa who passed away a few years ago.

I was overjoyed last year when my friend Fatima borrowed an old film camera of mine, and found it still had film undeveloped film in it. When she developed it, I found that there were pictures of when my grandparents visited me in college. I previously thought that these pictures had been lost completely, so you can imagine my surprise when they turned up in old film. Though the film had degraded, I was able to use Photoshop to somewhat restore the color.

That's why I take crazy precautions to protect the digital photos that I have now. It's a bit easier to archive digital files, but some people would say that I go a little overboard.

Like most people, I have the photos on my computer.

I also have a backup copy of the photos on a secondary backup hard drive which is backed up every week.

I also burn archive copies of the photos to two DVDs, which are kept in two separate locations, so if the house burns down, it doesn't take the backups with it.

Finally, most digital pictures (the ones I like at least) are uploaded to Flickr where they will remain as long as Yahoo! doesn't go bankrupt.

I've been considering manually scanning all my family's paper photos onto the computer and then archiving them the same way. However, at the rate that a scanner functions, it would take me months of scanning, let alone post-processing and color-correcting them. I do want to do it though. Maybe after the wedding is over.