I have been completing digital pages since 2001, long before Creative Memories started selling StoryBook Creator. For several years, I used the now obsolete Aunt Abigail to create digital pages. The features of this program are rudimentary by today’s standards, but at the time they were quite advanced. This program never sold well, selling less than 1000 copies, and support was discontinued quite some time ago.
Recently, I tried to locate the digital files for my early album pages and was dismayed to learn that 2002-2004 no longer existed on my computer. I do not know what happened, perhaps these files disappeared during the Windows 7 migration, perhaps they disappeared earlier.
I wanted to recover these files, and ideally, I wanted them in a form I could use. Fortunately, I had printed copies, and I had access to a scanner. I scanned the completed pages and had my digital albums back.
The scanned pages may or may not be as good as the original files. I cannot tell. I am glad to have them, since I did not have the time and energy to recreate these pages digitally. If I had not had the printed copies, I would have been “out of luck.”
I have now stored these files in standard TIF and PDF file formats in two locations, so hopefully, I will not lose them again. In addition, since they are now in a standard file format, I can easily import them into my StoryBook Creator projects, something I could not easily do when they were stored in a proprietary format.
All About Images Blog 
Hense my favorite mantra…a bad photo (digital image) is better than NO photo (digital image)..We are all in the same boat on the sea of early digital images…working hard to get them all printed in SB+s & the jpegs of the completed pages saved in Memory Manager, & backed up.
backup, backup, backup..
My backup saved me from having to go to a data recovery service. I talking with Gillware, DriveSavers and Fields, none of them were cheap but Gillware had I needed them Gillware was the most affordable. Thankfully I didn’t end up needing them.
A backup solution like..
http://mozy.com or http://carbonite.com can keep you from having to call one of these guys:
http://gillware.com
http://drivesavers.com
http://fieldsdatarecovery.com
Mark, You are so correct! It’s amazing what can be done with a good scanner and MM for these seemingly ‘lost photos’. I recently scanned original photos from a 1979 album that had previously been in one of the ‘lethal’ magnetic albums. Some pictures were discolored, faded, etc., even the few Polaroids we took were much brighter after color correction and cropping. CM Rocks!!