Google+ Destroyed This Blog

Sadly, there will be no Money Saving Monday today. In fact, there won't be any blog posts for quite some time.

Last night I decided to give Google+ a try. In case you haven't heard of it, Google+ is a challenger to Facebook. When you log on to it, Google+ looks exactly like Facebook, except for some differences. For example, you can put friends, family, and acquaintances in different circles, and choose what information you want to share with each.

I quickly made my circles with the few people who have joined Google+, then I went on to my photo albums. When I first logged in, I was asked if I'd like to "link" to my Picasa web albums. I didn't think anything of the word "link," and figured Google+ simply was trying to make things easier for me by uploading some existing pictures. I then checked out which pictures uploaded with the plan of deleting whatever I didn't want to share on Google+. I was under the impression that like Facebook, when I deleted pictures, they just disappeared from my Google+ page. I had no idea that when I deleted an unknown album of 305 pictures, that it would also be deleted from my Picasa web album, and from my blog on Blogger. Apparently, anything done in Google+ affects all other Google-run sites. In this case, Picasa and Blogger.

Now my blog is pretty much void of pictures. A years worth of work is gone. To me it's not just a blog that has been dismantled, it's a photo journal of our lives. The main reason I started this blog was to have something that Liam, and whatever future children we have, could look back and see the events we've shared. I want the stories and photos to be kept alive even after friends and family are gone.

Over the next few days, and likely weeks, I'll be attempting to piece together a couple posts each day. A majority of the pictures are saved on our computer hard drive, but there were also many that were temporary and will never be recovered. Pictures I took of dishes I cooked, and screen shots I did for Money Saving Monday posts, were deleted. Because of this, some of my posts will continue to have no pictures, or broken links.

I want this blog to be a permanent document of our lives, but now know it's vulnerable. If anyone knows of a better way to blog, please let me know.

-Anna