Hard Lesson Learned

Sorry for my lack of posting lately.  I know it's been sporadic.  Here's the story....My hard drive crashed......I had nothing backed up....so it's hard to want to post anything since I feel like I lost everything. 

We had an old (I'm talking older than all my kids) computer that we have used for years.  Two years ago it crashed.  Luckily we had a friend who was able to fix it.  We used if for another 2 months and it crashed again.  He was able to revive it long enough for us to download everything onto an external hard drive.  I thought I had learned my lesson.  We got a cheap computer and never saved anything on it, just saved it straight to our external hard drive thinking it would never crash (because that's what we were told)  It has been wonderful.

A few weeks ago though I had this nagging feeling like I needed to buy another external hard drive to back up the existing hard drive we were using.  I kept having this feeling, over and over and over again, shoving it to the back of my mind each time, thinking I would get around to that, but I didn't.  It was working fine one day and the next day we plugged it in to download our pictures from the week and we get this beeping sound....you know the one....ya, that one, and on top of that I can't even get it to power up.  Nothing.....Oh the agony, it was like learning that a good friend had died.  Seriously, years of pictures gone...my journal that I have kept faithfully since 2nd grade..gone...my mom's stories.. family history, pictures of my nephew that passed away and I'm the only one who had pictures of him...oh the misery.  I'm telling you I have been going crazy. 

I cried and cried and cried and pouted and moped around for days.  Then I got realistic.  What can I do at this point.  I started surfing around online and found tons of data recovery services.  10 quotes later, I know that is not an option.  At least not at this point.  Even Circuit City (I know blah.....)  quoted me $250 just to look at it.  Ummm.....no thanks.  So I put the hard drive away until I can save up enough money - I'm talking $1,000 - $3,500 (that's what the quote range was). I started thinking of what else I could do. 

I think there might be some small chance that I can power up the old computer which happens to be on a shelf in the garage, because even though it's dead and I have asked my husband countless times to get rid of it he keeps EVERYTHING.  Seriously, he is a hoarder.  But in this case I am grateful.  So I take the tower to my sisters house, since we kept the tower but nothing else and I only have a laptop.  We use her monitor, keyboard, mouse, plug the tower in and I wait....It powers up but as I start going through files on the computer I get "error" messages all over the place.  All of the files are corrupt.  I'm crying again.  Then by some small chance I remember that our friend had to install a 2nd hard drive on the computer when he fixed it the 2nd time and he mirrored the 1st hard drive to the 2nd.  So I hack into the slave drive and low and behold by some miracle my files are there.  Not all of them mind you, I haven't used that computer in over 2 years, but hey I will take what I can get.  I quickly copy everything I can find over to my new external hard drive and cry - again because we were able to recover many of our pictures, most of my journal, and all of the pictures of my nephew.  Oh happy day.  Next up is trying to pull information that I might have saved online here is my list so far:

1.  Picnik - closed down as of April 19, 2012, but not before I was able to download all of the pictures I had ever edited on their website.  Which happens to be about 1500 pictures. 
2.  Shutterfly - oh how I used to love Shutterfly, but I have lost almost all respect for them at this point.  I have ordered many photo books, Christmas cards, etc over the years from Shutterfly.  I logged onto my account to try and download the pictures that I had saved in my photo albums on their website.  Here's the deal, you cannot download the original image (which you downloaded in the first place).  You can only save a small format of the image (it's not even good enough quality to print a 5 x 7 of).  I emailed them and told them what happened and they said they were sorry but they did not allow their customers to download the original image off their website, however I could "order" and pay for an archived CD of the images (which are mine to begin with).  (What, are you kidding me, so your telling me that I actually have to buy back my images from you?  Yes - that would be correct.)  Blah - so $25 later and I ordered my archived CD of images.
3.  Blogger - Oh the land of blogging.  Yay for my blog that I have kept up to date.  Because lets face it, 2 years might not seem like a lot to some people but if you think about the fact that Lucas is only 3, yeah well, that it almost his entire life in photos that I am now missing.  So I do have my blog, however, same as with shutterfly, you can save your pictures that you originally downloaded, but they are not the same size as when you originally put them on your blog.  But a fuzzy picture might be better than none at all. 
4.  Facebook - same as with the blog, but I really don't have to many pictures on my facebook account.
5.  Kimo's Kamera - I seriously order all of my prints from Kimo's.  It's a small store in my old hometown and I love the quality and price of their prints.  My pictures are always perfect when I order from there, plus, oh and here is the great thing....I can download all of  the pictures I have saved in my online account from their website at their ORIGINAL SIZE.  Yes, you read that right.  (You mean I actually get to have my original picture back? yes, imagine that.  It was mine to begin with) Haha.  Love them!!    http://www.kimoskamera.com/


So there it is.  I am in no way done recovering all of the information that I lost, but I have a good start, and I am working on backing everything up.  Burning pictures to CD's.  I now have 2 external hard drives, plus I have a few things backed up on line.  I have had to learn this lesson the hard way.  So to all of you that don't have your stuff backed up in at least 2 places, well hopefully you can learn from my mistake.