By Emily Bontrager
Some people reading this may not even know what a VHS tape is, and that alone says a lot about how quickly time moves and technology changes.
VHS tapes were once the standard way families recorded life at home. Before smartphones and digital cameras, events like birthday parties, Christmas mornings, weddings, and everyday moments were captured on bulky cassette tapes that played inside large VCRs. You had to rewind them. You couldn’t skip easily, and if you taped over something by accident, it was gone.
For years, these tapes were treasured. Then technology changed. VCRs disappeared, replaced by DVD players, Blu-ray players, and now streaming, where you can rent, buy, or watch almost anything on a smart TV.
VHS tapes are now boxed up and pushed into closets, basements, and attics. Many families haven’t seen their old home movies in years, not because they don’t care, but because they no longer have a way to play them.
The biggest problem is that VHS tapes were never meant to last forever.
Magnetic tape breaks down over time. Heat, humidity, and age slowly damage the images and sound. Eventually, the tape can snap or become unplayable altogether. When that happens, the memories recorded on them are lost permanently.
That’s why I decided to take the time to convert my family’s old VHS home movies into digital formats like DVDs or flash drives. The most important thing to me is saving pieces of family history before they disappear.
Old home movies hold a different kind of value than photos. They capture the way someone walked or talked. Often, they include people who are no longer here, preserved exactly as they were in everyday life. These are moments no one ever thought would become rare.
Digitizing these tapes makes them accessible again. Once converted, I can share them with other family members so they can watch them on modern TVs, computers, or tablets. Videos can be shared with relatives who live far away, backed up for safekeeping, and passed down to future generations who may have never seen these moments otherwise.
There is also something meaningful about sitting down to watch old home movies in real time. I enjoy seeing how homes looked, how people dressed, and how loved ones sounded when they spoke. It’s a reminder that ordinary days eventually become history.
Many people don’t realize how close they are to losing these recordings until they pull out a box of tapes and realize there’s no way to play them, or until one finally fails. By then, the chance to save those memories may already be gone.
Luckily, we still have a VHS player, so I only needed a USB video capture adapter. I hooked up the VCR to my computer, put the home video in, and with one video app, I was able to start converting our family home movies.
I gave my father a copy for Christmas of the first VHS tape I transferred. I put it on a USB flash drive. This home video was especially meaningful. It was originally taken on 35 mm film in 1968 and 1969, when my father was a baby. That footage had been saved from a house fire in 1979, when my father and his family lost their home.
Watching those old home movies reminded me that memory is fragile, and history often survives by chance. That film from the late 1960s survived a house fire, decades of changing formats, and years tucked away in storage. Not every tape will be that lucky. Preserving VHS home movies is choosing to act before time makes the decision for us, so the voices, laughter, and ordinary moments that shaped our families are not lost. Because once those tapes are gone, so are the stories they hold.