“Janice and I lived in our home since 1979. We raised our children and grandchildren here. Every inch of our house was filled with love. Beautiful memories that can’t be taken away.”
This one hit me hard. I wish what Billy said was true, but it isn’t that simple. As we get older, it gets very difficult to remember everything clearly. When people say “a house full of memories”, what they really mean is a “a house full of memory triggers”. Mr. Crystal, his wife, and his children have lost a lot of those triggers to the fire.
I might be silly and sentimental, but this made me genuinely very sad.
This isn’t to detract from your larger “it sucks to have your house burn down” point, but specifically for photo albums, it’s fairly reasonable to have an off-site backup these days. Don’t even need fancy cloud storage or anything, if you don’t want to worry about data harvesting or leaks or whatever – can just get yourself a USB key drive and a safe deposit box. Hell, even just drop them off with a relative or something.
I think that most people have at least some things that they can be sure won’t be lost in a disaster like a house fire, so worth thinking about. I’m not saying that everyone has actually done that, but I do think that it’s a good thing to maybe think about doing.
On the back up idea, remember 321 3 backups, 2 types of media, 1 off-site