How to protect your family memories when converting in VHS home movies into digital files

Do you have a bunch of VHS tapes of family memories? A baby's first steps, graduations or one of grandma's big birthdays?

Then you need to know what happened to one woman when she mailed in some of her priceless tapes to have them converted.

Debi Fields wants to remember her grandmother.

"She lived to be 108 years old," Fields said.

At 105, Hayes even made newspaper headlines in her hometown in eastern Kentucky.

So Fields decided to preserve her grandmother's memory with digital dubs of some VHS tapes.

"There was a Groupon offered that I bought at the end of November last year for a company called Memories on Media," Fields said.

So Fields decided to preserve her grandmother's memory with digital dubs of some VHS tapes.

She shipped the tapes to the Winston-Salem, North Carolina company.

"But as of today I've still not received them back," she said.

Where are the tapes?

There's actually a lot of demand for tape dubbing these days, as families rush to convert decaying VHS tapes onto digital files that can last for decades.

Unfortunately, it seems some companies can't keep up with that rush.

Now, she's starting to panic.

"Come May I still hadn't received anything," Fields said. "Called but couldn't get through."

"These are so precious to me," she said. "They are memories of my grandmother at her 100th birthday party. As far as I know, it's the only speaking video we have of her."

After numerous attempts to contact the company, an employee said that Memories on Media was swamped by an increase in orders from the Groupon deal and lost some employees in the spring. Now, they're trying to catch up.

The lesson?

-Check a dubbing company's Better Business Bureau rating : Memories on Media has an "F, " due to a number of other customers with the same complaint of lost tapes.

-Never send all your tapes out to one location at once, no matter how good the deal. Hold some back.

A Memories on Media rep later said they would make Fields' tapes a priority. Two weeks later, Fields received all her videos back, along with the new digital copies.

But there is a great lesson here for anyone wanting to dub over their precious home movies: Don't send them all out at once, so you don't waste your money.