history through the eyes of nerds

A while ago, between some boxes my mother had packed up during a move, I found pictures of my grandmother from when she was a teenager. These probably date to the 1930s or early 1940s in Poland. Quite interesting. The picture's colors had faded a bit, but the image was still very clear. A nice memory. In a different box I found dozens of photo albums from my mother and father's wedding, my childhood, my brother and sister etc....nice stuff. Too bad its very likely the end of photographic history of my family. In a few months my sister will be having a baby. And though I live far from where she is, I will most likely be able to see that baby growing up through countless images and videos emailed to me. It will be nice while as the baby is growing up, but will that baby ever get to show its children and grandchildren what it looked like grwing up? I doubt it. In the past all you needed to save your memories was a water tight box. Today you require knowledge way above most peoples technological abilities in order to safely save photos. Families without an assigned geek will loose absolutely every picture in their possesion every few years, and will have to start over.
Pictures will be lost everytime a hard drive crashes (and you know all drives eventually crash), everytime a virus invades a machine, and everytime a machine is "slow" and is taken to a lazy pseudo-geek who will "solve" all problems with a reformat, not caring about the information inside the machine.
Several years from now, the only personal/family history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that will remain will be that of geeks and nerds.