I am starting to realize that many of the memories our generation and those following leave behind will be lost because a lot of the photos and letters are electronic, only a lost password from never being shared with our descendants.

I know some people print out some of their digital photos and send them to relatives, but how many times do we just pass around digital photos attached to emails that sit on computers? One hard drive failure or change of computer and they might be gone for ever.

I do copy my photos and some emails to CDs, but 50 years from now the technology will have changed so the CDs won't be readable, assuming they haven't deteriorated like we've been warned that they will every three or four years.

My MyBloggers Messages box was getting fuller and fuller of not only 'so-so has replied to your comment' links, but also correspondence with dear friends like Jeri. Also, I don't know how to scroll down through the messages, so only the most recent ones can be viewed about 5 or 6 at a time. My solution has been to copy the messages from Jeri into a Word document, and that feels like a good solution for now.

If I wanted to save her 'letters' for good, I'd print out the file, but I haven't gotten to that point yet.

It's kind of sad to think about this lack of hard copies to pass along, but I haven't worked myself up to figuring out what I plan to do about it.