So I might be kind of a hoarder (especially when it comes to technology), but I do not like losing my information, whether it is photos, emails, websites, text messages etc. So when I offered my old 3GS to a friend who needed it more than my purse, my biggest concern was “how was I going to preserve my text messages that I had saved from 2008?”

Now I am sure you are asking “what is the big deal? They are just old text messages. Are you really ever going to read through them again?” Honestly I am not 100% sure why I want them all, I just know that I would be really sad to lose them.  The only ones that I really cared about were the ones from my friend Jason Schippers who passed away last year, the rest are just bonus, I suppose.

So why did I care about these messages from Jason? Well he helped me get through two really tough times in my life. We had bonded over Twitter when he reached out to me because of our mutual love and respect for Tickle Me Pink and shortly after that, we became good friends.

He was a very influential person when it came time for me to decide to move from Fort Collins to Boulder and break up with my ex-boyfriend. I was one of the first people he told when him and his wife decided to call it quits and get divorced. He was there for me when I found love again in Boulder, and again when my heart was broken. I was one of the people who talked him into moving back to Denver for a job. He always insisted I texted him before I left on a trip and he was the first one I texted when I landed (a tradition that I miss dearly). He always wanted to made sure I was safe.

For all the above reasons and more, I was just not willing to give up the past 3 years of text messages. I even went so far as to take screen shots of all our messages and was ready to save them to flickr to ensure I still had access to the messages. After asking Twitter how to save the messages, which turned out to be no help, I finally received a viable option to preserve text messages from a friend at PodCamp Boulder this past weekend. Michael Sitarzewski told me about Missing Sync which is a program that extracts and stores your text messages in an easy to read format. Yes, it did cost me $30 to download it, but the peace of mind was worth it to me. Losing that information would have eaten away at me (at least for a few months).

After reading through my conversation with Jason at least 3 times in the past few days, I am so grateful that I will always have access to our messages. I can look back at our texts and will forever be reminded about his biggest message to me: “smile.” Jason always told me he loved my smile. He was the person who could always text me and make me smile.

Now he will always continue to make me smile.