I used the idea of a book for my header since this challenge is going to be a journal of my life over the years.
I hope you enjoy viewing these pages of my life as they unfold. I know I will...

Friday, April 29, 2011

Ironic

I am no stranger to hard drive failures. I had a lap top fail on me six years ago and I lost my 7 year old daughter's pictures from the first year of her life. Shortly after I got into photography I had my computer crash and I lost everything on it but luckily had it all backed up.

Last Thursday was my third time. Three strikes and I'm out. At least I really feel like quitting now. I had 3 hard drives in this computer and they were supposed to be backing each other up in case one failed. Instead, the computer was splitting up all the data onto the three equally so when one of them failed it made the data on the other two unreadable so it's all gone.

I had all but one of my client photos backed up but I've lost all my own personal photos. All my family vacation pictures, easter, all the every day adorable things I love about my kids - gone. As if that isn't bad enough, all my Lightroom presets are gone, all of my Photoshop actions and textures, all of my documents.

I may be able to recover everything but it will cost a minimum of $1,000. The irony of this all - I just spent $1,000 on a new Drobo system to back up all of my stuff and I just got it in the mail the day before my computer crashed. In fact, I was turning it on so I could hook up my new Drobo.

I am so angry and frustrated and haven't slept well for days. This kind of thing is devastating to happen once but three times now?

*I was so upset about my computer crashing I didn't take a picture and am just putting this as my post for the day. I thought of some pics I could take that would be appropriate but I just didn't feel like taking it. For the first time, I have no picture to post. Oh well, life and my 365 challenge will go on.*

7 comments:

Chillygator said...

Oh my gosh, Suzanne! I am so, so sorry!

Renée said...

I am sooooo sorry.Not that it helps, but it happened to me as well. I lost two years of everything a while back.

Jeremy Hall said...

So seriously frustrating. Seems no matter how much we try to have redundancy in backups we end up losing something along the way.

Those data recovery services bug me too; their pricing is just so high its ridiculous. I understand they need to make money, but it feels like they are taking advantage of you when you have no other choice.

Start a recovery fund, I'd pitch in. Heck, sell your presets in exchange (if they can be recovered) and I bet there'd be plenty interested.

Les said...

How devastating!! There isn't anything I can even say to make you feel better! :(

Christy said...

Words can't describe--terrible just doesn't quite cover it!! I'm hurting for you!! Maybe you could get someone to recover it in exchange for pictures?

Val said...

I am sick for you! My husband and I have just been talking about this. He wants to know who did your set up? So sad :(

Danette He said...

Oh my heart goes out to you. I hope you recover everything, so that you can put this horrible experience behind you. I'm working on backing up all my stuff to disk now, and I'm way behind in doing it. I hope your friend's husband can help you set things up with your new computer and help you get rid of all the errors in your old system. I had a great tech guy and he moved to California. It is such peace of mind when you have a computer tech who is good at what they do and can come and help rescue you when things go south. You are one of the best photographers out there. I love to watch your posts of your work. I hope you don't stay discouraged too long. It's just the adversary trying to get to you and discourage you from your work. Don't let him win. I hope you recover everything, because it would be too much of a shame for all those beautiful photographs of yours to be lost forever. I also move all my files over to an outside source and keep them there. Then I have that source move the files to disk for me once a year, so I have a disk I make and a disk they make to back each other up if a disk fails. I also have the external hard drives backing each other up.