If your home caught on fire and you had enough time to run in and get one thing before the fire enveloped the home, what would it be?
If your answer is a two dimensional object – like a picture or a collection of pictures such as a baby book, wedding book, scrapbook or other memorabilia – you need a scanner.
The two greatest inventions for people who are looking to save items like those, are as follows.
1. A scanner.
2. A flash drive.
You might look at a scanner and think that it is a relatively useless piece of equipment that you might use every once in a while – perhaps if you got a scanner/copier, you would use it more for the latter option. But scanners were built for one reason: to transfer physical analog images into digital representations. Let’s face it. Every photo we have that is in printed or developed form is going to fade, deteriorate and eventually disintegrate into dust over time. Every single one of them, bar none. If you want to save them and keep the
Someone recently told me, “But if I scan them, then I won’t have the original – and the original means more to me than one I can print out.” I hate to sound morbid about this, but the original will eventually disintegrate unless you put it in an airtight glass-enclosed container that is impervious to light and temperature changes.
That’s the security the Declaration of Independence is under right now – and even it is losing it’s structure by the year.
In short, get the pictures you have scanned NOW because they will deteriorate – they could even be destroyed tomorrow by a fire where you can’t run in and save them. If you wait six months, the picture will show that much more wear and tear to whatever you expose it to – light, heat, cold, gnats, mice, rodents, insects, water, fire or any combination of those.
Flash drives are incredibly useful because they can store the data of scanned pictures and give you the security that you can take them with you – even on a key chain. Not only that but unlike CD’s or DVD’s, you can take data off of a flash drive and put additional data on without burning another disk.
These items can be purchased for as little as $100 (combined) to as much as $400 (depending on how many features you want with the scanner that can also functions as a copier, printer, fax machine and as a slide scanner).
You don’t have an excuse anymore. Those items that you wanted to run into the house could have already been saved on a flash drive after being scanned into your computer. If you’ve already done that, great!
