A few years ago, I acted out in anger and ended up breaking my hard drive on my laptop. I came to realize I had lost over a year of our pictures because I didn't back them up onto the external hard drive. (In all honesty, I had an external drive die so I wasn't too confident but a copy would have been nice.) The drive was physically broken so the data was unrecoverable unless we sent it to some company that might have been able to recover it - for a hefty price tag. I sent the drive to my father-in-law and he confirmed that he couldn't get anything off it. I resigned myself to the loss of the pictures. The only reason I revisit this issue is because I have recently realized the devastating affect of my choice.... I lost picture from the summer of 2013 through most of 2015. I'm not kidding! That's two years of our lives lost. I wanted to make a book for Camdilyn about her first year but realized I don't have any of them. She was born in Sept of 2013 so I don't have anything from her first year in my archives. Fortunately, I do have my blog. I just spent over an hour looking through the blog and saving pictures from her first year! I am so glad I blogged during that time, to save what I did have and what a relief that is to my aching heart!
New heart ache - April 10 - Instead of making another post very similar to this one, I thought I would just add it on.... I took Marissa to her school test today and I took my laptop with me so I could work on updating the blog while I waited for her. It worked fine and I was excited to do the same thing again the next day while Ben was doing his testing. After I got home, I tried to turn on my computer and it made a beeping/chirping noise and then stopped and said there was not drive. I calmly turned it off, unscrewed the cover on the back and disconnected the hard drive, then reconnected it. I put the cover back on and hoped against all odds that the reseating of the drive made the right connections and it would magically turn on. Unfortunately, I have terrible luck with hard drives so I wasn't all that surprised when it didn't turn on. I am dumbfounded as to why I have such bad luck with hard drives and why they just seem to be able to crash on a whim! It's really irritating, and heart breaking.
Update - April 19 - I had to take the computer to SAMSA, the place in town that I always take my stuff to. I was hoping that they could retrieve some of the stuff off the drive, just copy it all to a new hard drive and I could pick up a my computer as if nothing happened, and just pay them some money. Unfortunately, the drive was so dead that they couldn't get anything off of it. Fortunately, I only lost about two weeks of pictures from March of this year. I had backed up all the rest. Now, I may have lost videos but I'm not sure about that. If I care that much about these memories, I should probably be better about archiving them and burning them to bluerays so I don't lose them.
