It was a busy day last Fall with my three kids age five, seven and nine. We were running from activity to activity. Stopping at home for a few minutes in between so I could grab snacks, my computer and then try to get some work done while sitting through gymnastics or tennis or scouts or soccer.

We had a tight schedule and in the middle of one activity, I had a conference call scheduled. I get on the conference call and all of a sudden my phone freezes up. I look at it, try to hit some buttons as I am fumbling around and realize I have been dropped from the call because my phone was no longer on. I turn the phone over thinking that maybe I need to remove the battery and it flies out of my hand shattering on the ground.

I was stunned. And devastated. I felt like crying and then I just did. I really cried about a phone.

I had over 1000 pictures of my kids on my phone. Everything that I had taken over the past month was just gone. I felt as if I had lost a month of our lives. This is how important pictures are to me. I am the memory keeper in our family and I take my job seriously as I capture every single moment that I can.

As a writer, I am constantly on deadline so I use my phone a lot to take pictures of what I am planning to write about. Places. Products. People. I had pictures for articles that I needed to write and had been compiling for a few weeks. They were gone too.

I had my life on my phone. And in that instant, when that phone shattered, it died completely and everything was truly gone, I was lost. I took it to three different places but there was nothing they could do. They couldn’t bring anything back.

My next phone was a Windows phone. With the Windows phone, I discovered this cool thing called SkyDrive and I instantly wondered how we had never crossed paths before. I was fascinated by the cloud and cloud computing but I was never really sure how it factored into my life until now.

With SkyDrive…all of those photos that I lost from phone? Well that just would not have happened. On my Windows Phone, all of my photos are saved to my SkyDrive as soon as I take the picture. They automatically show up in the Pictures hub on my phone which I love. This makes my life so much easier and makes me feel so much better.

Another cool feature is that it is incredibly easy to share my photos with others. Sometimes I like to edit photos on my iPad and then post them on my blog or Facebook or Twitter with the built-in share option.

SHARING ON SKYDRIVE

I am also constantly sharing photos with friends and family. If I am on my phone, I simply send a link to my photo album which makes sharing a breeze. If I am at my computer, I just decide how I want to share which most of the time is by email but there are plenty of options.

I am all about making my life easier. Technology like SkyDrive helps me do that. Never again will I lose photos or files from my phone. I am connected through the cloud and this gives me tremendous peace of mind. I cannot believe that it took me this long to get here.

I am Microsoft SkyDrive Ambassador.