Yesterday, one of my worst nightmares happened.
Yesterday, I plugged my external hard drive in....and.....
click...hum
click...hum
click...hum
Now, I'm no computer expert by far...but I knew by that noise that my hard drive was shot.
Nearly 4 years ago, I had that same feeling, when every picture and video was robbed from me. During the search warrant of our house (as you may know, my husband abused at least one of my children and I turned him into the police) the police took every computer, laptop, server, video camera, camera, sd card, flash drive, hard drive, dvd, etc. With the investigation went every picture and video I had of my precious children. More than a year later got my precious photos & video's back, but I will never forget what it felt like to be robbed of them in the first place.
During the following year there were many "firsts", many special moments, holidays, Baptism, etc. and one day, my sd card got corrupted. I lost an entire year's worth of precious pictures. As a busy mom, I never backed them up...they were gone. I learned an expensive lesson...back up my pictures! So, since then I've been sure to download my pictures/videos to an external hard drive.
Now we are up to the other day. I went in search of pictures for our new blogs, so I went through every picture on my hard drive. I had so many pictures! I smiled as a remenised with each picture I looked at. "Oh, I remember that"..."Aww, look at ..." I even came across a video folder that I didn't remember I had. All of the video's that were downloaded off of our video camera. When the police gave me back the laptop, I cut them off of there and put them on the external hard drive. I didn't have time to mess with figuring out how to open the files, but I couldn't wait to go back to them later. Even though Macaw's birth was the most horrific birth experience I have ever encountered, I couldn't wait to watch it.
Yesterday, my heart sank. I felt my world come crashing down. I felt an immediate emptyness. I felt completely lost! Even though I knew my drive was "gone", we took it to get an opinion from the "Geek Squad". The news was, our hard drive was shot and the only way to retreive the data from it would be to send it out to a "clean lab" where it would have to be completely disassembled. The cost...$2,500. At this point, I literally thought I was going to puke. I knew exactly what I had lost, because just the day before I had looked through every last picture.
Gone! All of them....forever Gone!
I never printed any pictures, simply because I couldn't afford to. I never backed them up because I never took the time to. I cut them from my camera card and put them on my hard drive and that was it. Stupid, this I know. So, to save myself from this heartbreak I felt done...done with cherishing my "stupid" photos. Falcon had just gotten me a new camera for Christmas. He gave it to me early so that I would be familiar with it and be able to use it for the holidays. I didn't like it anyways...it wasn't a good "fit" for me...so it made it a bit easier to say "I don't want to take pictures anymore because I don't EVER want to feel this way again.
We got a few more estimates on our drive. Most of them bring the same news...it's going to cost around $3,000 for me to get my treasured photos back. Now, I did do some research and it seems I may be able to put it in the freezer and be capable of getting the data off of it. When I can think with a clearer head and be sure I'm making the best decision, I just may try it!
For now...Falcon talked me into keeping my camera (although we went and picked out a new one). From now on, I will never delete a camera card, I will put a copy on a hard drive and I will download my pictures online to an account such as photobucket, picasa web albums, etc. and every few months, I will burn my pictures to a cd and maybe somday, we will be able to afford to get our pictures back.
