Photo Saving the Photos of Life-Saving

My husband was traveling when our son was slated for an emergency surgery the next day to place a caterer in his chest to begin dialysis two days later. We always knew our kids would get donor kidneys, but we were caught off guard with the speed at which our son’s native kidneys failed due to ARPKD. He was nervous and I snapped a picture of him with a green PKD shirt on. His eyes in that photo haunt me, still. In fact, several of both of our kids do. A little over a year later we started our road to our daughter’s transplant. This is what consumed us from 2006 to 2009.

I’m horribly sentimental. I suppose I’ve always been that way but when the kids were diagnosed as “medically fragile” at ages 3 and birth, my memories and pictures took on new meaning. A year ago I made a lot of mistakes technology wise and my hard drive ended up blank. I lost everything. Luckily our tech guy was able to retrieve everything that was on my desktop from a couple of months prior. I lost some documents, photos and all 10,000 or so emails. When I lost all of those emails, I lost all of the pictures that people had emailed me over the years. I hadn’t moved most of them into nice little folders on my desktop, unfortunately. Gone.

Since then I have photos saved everywhere. A few months ago I put them on a 1 terabyte external drive, I’ve saved different categories to flash drives, and I have a server that most things are saved to periodically, although sometimes it doesn’t work (hence why out back up was a couple of months old).

The kids, now 16 and 14, have survived a lot in their young lives and it’s chronicled in photos. They don’t care much to relive those days. One day, when they care to have them I want to hand over the thousands (27k so far) photos about their individual journeys to health and probably another 10k photos to get them through liver transplants, perhaps in college. I don’t necessarily want them to see the sad parts, but sometimes I feel like seeing some of those photos helps us appreciate the happy and good parts about life.

I uploaded 27k photos yesterday (it took about 10+ hours) to a Bevy. I pulled over the 60 folders easily from my desktop to the Roberts Family Bevy. There was a day or so of back and forth with technical support (3 calls, 4+ emails) because of my misunderstanding. I wasn’t clear that I couldn’t view and pull photos off of my Mac app the same way as on the phone app —  you have to download a folder or photo to a folder on the computer. The phone app is the one to work from to view them, get them, send them and it’s super easy. Everyone in the family can get the app and upload their photos, so all of our photos are safe. I’ve kept some working files to the tune of about 1000 photos on my desktop and the rest are safely stored on our Bevy. A note about their tech department below.* Honestly, if there’s a fire, I’m grabbing my family and this Bevy. Can you imagine being at risk again to lose your photos? Add on the fact the fine Bevy people are working on a cloud component for a fee, there will be double backup, so, yes to that for me, too. I guess this one (there are two sizes) will hold about 400k photos. I don’t think we’ll hit that many, but one never knows. There could be a lot of drama around here that needs to be chronicled, but mostly now, we’re taking pictures of life and what kidney function looks like in kids. So, we save a lot of living life photos.

Life takes a lot of pictures.

——

Follow Bevy….Twitter, Facebook , Instagram, Pinterest

When I saw a presentation at a conference by a co-founder I immediately tucked away the discount code because I knew I needed it. A little bit about this post and how it came about…I searched for the product in a Type-A Parent conference group to inquire about purchasing it with a discount I had seen at the conference in October and I enthusiastically applied to try it. All opinions are my own because we all know I like to have those. So while I was compensated for this post and given the Bevy to try, I was excited about it well before they offered me the chance to try their product for free and tell you about it.

I love this thing. 

Don’t tell them but I’d have said that for free. 

(*And Freddy and Brian didn’t know I was writing and testing the Bevy, either, which makes their excellent service all the more excellent.)

———–