The memory cards had such small capacity, were so expensive, and general backup options were so few that I have maybe low hundreds items of digital photos from

The memory cards had such small capacity, were so expensive, and general backup options were so few that I have maybe low hundreds items of digital photos from the era before 2010-2015. For a long time the best backup strategy had been 4.4GB DVD, oftentimes the memory card was erased without any backup. Since then I've been storing almost every digital photo.