Looking Back
I used to have fifty folders of photos on my laptop, arranged by date (2020-05 for May 2020 so they would appear in order). Then I had special topical folders, like Family Classic Photos, which held hundreds of old photos I had scanned. My uncle called me the family historian. It was my goal to scan every old photo we had, and we had a ton of them. I used to give CDs of these photos to my family at Christmas.
I also spent time typing up my grandmother’s poetry. It had been typed on typewriters or scribbled on envelopes. I compiled the poems into a hard-copy binder and a digital folder.
One of my grandmothers was an artist. In her later years my aunt put together an art show for her, bringing all of her art together in one room. I carefully photographed each one and created a folder called Norma’s Art. I shared it with that side of the family, so all of us had a digital copy of her paintings.
I also had my own writings on my laptop, along with twenty years of business records, a list of every book I’ve ever edited (I’m up to around 550), and twenty years of extensive medical records and labs.
One day it was all gone.
I had suspected I had a hacker, but I didn’t know for sure until that moment. I opened folder after folder…all empty. They actually opened each folder and deleted the contents. All fifty of them.
My niece’s entire childhood was gone. My childhood. My brother’s. Mom and Dad’s memorial slideshow pictures.
Every so often OneDrive sends me memories from those folders. I can’t access them because my password was changed, but I can take a screenshot and get a glimpse of my life before targeting.
They were good memories, but sometimes it hurts to remember. Other times it feels so foreign it’s like looking at someone else’s life. Here are some glimpses of the life I lost. Feel free to add some of your own in the comments!
Dear Jill:
The photos are gone, but the happy memories that made you who you are will live with you forever. The loss is irreparable, but the memories that have not happened yet will fill priceless volumes that the criminals will not be able to destroy.
Honored to have you in our army of warriors fighting evil.
I have had similar things done, I was not so meticulous as you, but I had attempted to protect and store memories I had taken photos and videos of that in one way or another were disappeared and many now being held hostage by Google, and DropBox also did something similar so that I could no longer access that account.
I would have to say that companies like Microsoft and Apple have not been what we thought, they were certainly not founded in the way we thought, not by some guy in his mother’s garage who dropped out of college but military and intelligence that has always owned it. Why else did Bill Gates of Microsoft put NSA back doors into every computer? I suspect that is the case with any electronic device, they all do it and now Amazon as well also linked to DARPA and DOD has done it.
I began noticing this plot some years ago, one that most assuredly seemed to involve destroying cameras and anything where I had stored pictures and videos, then when we were lured into storing them in the cloud, at some point I was locked out by way of the login and password hijack. When I contacted Google to ask them to unlock my old Gmail where I had stored photos only being allowed to view snippets of them from time to time, they went into my new one and put a threshold on that one too. Now, I am forever deleting and can barely seem to keep up with what is now being lured as email traffic to gobble up my data so that this account too will be inaccessible. This has been systematic if we all just look at what has taken place.