lesson learned...the hard way...

Don’t forget to back up your computer…

Trust me. I know of what I speak. This past week and a bit have been very frustrating and disappointing. The hard drive in my laptop decided to die. This was no slow death either…it was sudden and completely unexpected. Sure, I had a blue screen or two prior, but nothing that would indicate it was in the final throws…

Wes has done everything in his power to try and recover the data. We even went so far as to try the "put your hard drive in the freezer" trick. We would get glimmers of hope and then nothing. The fellows in the IT department of the company I work for are giving it the hail mary and if I am VERY lucky, there will be good news tomorrow when I get to work. It's a very long shot so I don't want to get my hopes back up.

So, it’s dead…what do we do now. First thing is think about the last time I backed up my data. Hmmm? Not really sure. Couldn’t have been that long ago, could it?

I pull out my external hard drive and we plug it in to Wesley’s computer. December 2006. Okay, it could be worse. Now I have to think about everything that I have done on my computer since then. All my pictures from 2007!! That was the worst part. Okay, what did I take pictures of so far this year? Two trips to the Sunshine Coast. Crap! Oh man…Wesley’s 18th birthday. Double crap! Kyle’s tattoo pictures…Bummer! My Nick Bantock weekend in Victoria…Sucks! Then, I think…NO, not my Artfest pictures! Then a quick wave of relief passes over me as I remember that Wesley had accidentally copied my entire Artfest folder, including my trades and other projects and all my pictures of the event itself onto a CD. He was only supposed to copy the pics so I could send them to a friend who had also attended. Thanks so much for that, Wes!! Happy accident!

I will have to wait until next spring to capture those beautiful cherry blossom shots I lost. Sigh…

What about Wesley’s grad you may ask? Luckily all the grad dinner/dry grad pics had been put on Wesley’s computer as well, so we still have those. Phew! What about his actual grad ceremony? All the pics with the relatives we took? Hey, didn’t I burn those onto a CD and give it to my mother? Yes, I did! Phew plus!!

Needless to say I have learned my lesson the hard way. So, to all of you out there that maybe haven’t been backing up your computers on a regular basis, stop what you are doing right now and back up your most precious data! I am going to be extra careful with my pictures from now on and will be backing up my computer on a weekly basis!

At least I have my blog, which holds the only copies of some of my lost shots. Thank goodness for blogger!

The silver lining in all of this is at least when I purchased the laptop two and a bit years ago, I decided to get the extended warranty. The replacement hard drive has already arrived.

Gotta run. I have a database for our strata council that needs to be recreated.