I was asked recently to look at a product that essentially is an online storage/archiving facility for your own digital legacy. It’s called Vivala.me and it looks like a pretty neat and secure, online service for not only fully protecting all your digital information, but then actually managing it properly if the worst were to happen.

It made me stop and think about how many tens of thousands of pictures I have and what would happen to them if I suddenly wasn’t around.

On the basis that I have done around 15 or so European road trips on my bikes, and a typical average return would be about 1,500 to 2,000 pictures for each week away – then my road trip pictures alone make up a sizeable chunk of my picture collection.

Added to that are the thousands of pictures from over the years of all of the bikes I have had and probably pictures from every time I’ve added a bit to them, I suppose when it comes to my bikes I take pictures to the point of obsessiveness.

It’s fair to say that I have been a pretty prolific picture taker – and I reckon I’m just like many other bikers who have spent time trying to get that perfect picture of their machine.

Quite apart from the bike pictures. I have got many thousands more (in fact in excess of  150,000 digital pictures), cars, home, holidays, children, grandchildren, family events etc etc … and that’s before we get to all the stuff posted to Facebook!

Whilst I’ve got no plans to quit life just yet, the Vivala.me idea certainly got me thinking about this issue and it reminded me of an article about road accident statistics that I think I read a  year or so ago in the Motorcycle News (MCN).

The article was using 2012 as the latest year for which there were detailed road statistics.

In some ways it was good news – there was a 9% drop in bikers being killed on UK roads and this was also backed up by a decrease in the number of serious injuries, but of course it’s still way too many.

When I sat down to write this post I had  a quick look for the latest UK stats. The Government’s Think road safety site shows that in 2013, 331 motorcyclists died and 4,866 were seriously injured in road collisions in Great Britain, which although a pretty big fall on the figures from 2008 (493 and 5,556 respectfully) it’s still a lot and still far too many.

It’s not just in the UK that too many bikers die way too early. In the USA a 2015 report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed death from motorcycle crashes were up by 8.3% from 2014 but with injuries down by 4.3%

So I suppose that if you do ever sit down and think about the very thing that none of us really want to think about or you have been wise enough to get your will sorted but not included your digital legacy then this service is well worth a look at.

As bikers most of us spend a fair bit of time and money looking after our bikes, we take care to maintain them and prepare them for weekend rides, road trips and generally tend to make sure they are in tip top condition and looking their best even if its just to take a ride out with mates to the cafe! I bet theres not so many of us have spent as much time thinking about how to keep our valuable internet files like pictures, videos, documents, social media, banking etc safe. There’s a useful BBC article that provides a wake up call about own digital legacy and I think it’s well worth a look.

When we go out on our bikes we all expect to be coming home – if you’ve been a biker for a while, then sadly its a fair bet that you’ll know someone who didn’t make it home.

None of us know for sure what going to happen on the road. Vivala.me allows you to assign your digital assets to your family and friends, so if the worst does happen you can at least be sure they are safe.

Best of all is that Vivala.me can be set up at no cost – there’s a 500Mb storage option that comes with a free trail! As well as checking out the service at the various links in this post Vivala also has a Facebook page you can check out.

And just to round off this post, I’ll be at the Manchester Bike Show this coming Saturday which means a couple of Blog posts over the weekend and early next week … and yes that also means the inevitable bucket load of digital pictures!

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