In celebration of #WorldDigitalPreservationDay this year, Melissa Nolas, Director of the Children's Photography Archive takes a moment to reflect on her journey in digital preservation and what she's learnt over the last few months of thinking and doing digital preservation work for the CPA.

My first encounter with digital preservation - low key, personal - came with iPhoto when I switched to being a Mac user back in 2002. iPhoto Library before the days of the cloud tended on occasions to get corrupted especially across version updates or when upgrading devices. It was my PhD supervisor, a huge technophile, who had been the one to alert me to this ‘bug’. Not wanting to go through the grief of loosing photos (I had found the switch to digital photography painful enough), I started a ten year practice of manually backing up my photographs onto hard drives and creating my own separate photo filling system as well as putting them into iPhoto. That practice fell by the wayside when I had a kid (time, time, time…) and my fear of loosing digital photos has somewhat abated now that everything is backed up onto the cloud (yes, yes, I know that’s not entirely fool proof either but it will do for now).