Brace yourself, I’m kind of hysterical right now.
Um. So about 2 weeks ago my external hard drive, which houses ALL of my photography – all the photos we’ve ever taken of Jessica, Oliver, our wedding, honeymoon – anything that I ever put to film, EVER was on it – and it … it stopped working. It gave me errors and I said – hey Aaron – fix this please.
He tried … couldn’t and then gave it to his server guru who put it through some type of recovery software for like 96 insane hours or something and um, did not recover a thing. It didn’t work.
As of right now we have lost absolutely all of those images, videos of baby Jessica – our entire life in film.
I. Am. Sobbing.
Since I haven’t had the external hard drive, I’ve just been housing all my recent photos on personal computer – which is running out of memory rapidly – oh – and it’s a PC, not a mac. (We’ll talk about that later)
There’s another option yet, we can send the drive away to experts who usually DO recover everything and at this point, I’ll send it to the devils front door if it means I get my photos of Jessica first smile back in my possession. The photos I have of my dad before he died – the look that was captured on Aaron’s face as I walked down the aisle to marry him, to take his name, to make a life with him. All the photos of my swollen belly, glowing with life of my future inside. The 57 pictures we took of Jessica first birthday – all the same, but to me – each one is very different. In one she’s looking at the camera smiling, the next she’s eying the cake, the next she’s working on the candle and so on and so on.
All these precious moments in time, hours and hours of work – life, love – my passions.
External Hard Drive? Can you hear me? PLEASE retain your memory and spit it back out to me. I won’t ever over load you – I’ll keep you in a dry, cool place. Please. I don’t know what else to say.
jodimichelle
i tell stories
oh my. seriously. oh my.
i’m going to add that to my list of things to pray for. i’d be going crazy if i was you right now. pictures are so important.
i really hope someone can get them back for you!
that’s one of my very worst fears! i hope and pray that they can recover your photos!!
Both you and Aaron should know better! Backups are what save the day…a pain in the ass, but necessary for anything that’s important. Having only one copy of those is a disaster waiting to happen, as you’ve found out. I put my important stuff on a RAID system…it has two HD’s in the cabinet, and it automatically makes two copies of everything…mirroring each drive. If one drive dies, then you can swap it out and it will automatically create a copy when you put a new one back in. It still doesn’t hurt to copy things to DVD or other media as well. Big companies always put a second copy in an off-site location in case a fire or some other disaster destroys the in-house copy. At home, a fire safe would probably be ‘good enough’, but if you have a safe deposit box, you could put a stack of dvd’s there. There may be better boxes, but the one I’ve got is a D-Link DNS-323. You may wish to look into something like this. This drive sits on my Ethernet switch, and is accessable to any logged in computer. You can pick the size of the storage you want. I’ve only got two 250G drives in it, but so far, that’s been fine. It will take much bigger drives.
Data recovery services can often get most if not all back, but it is not cheap.
You have inspired me to get my photos backed up onto a disk ASAP before something similar takes place-I have worried about that! Hope you are able to recover all your treasures. God Bless!
Lana