For just a moment, frustration reared its ugly head, but upon inspecting the drive, all appeared to be in good order. All was well, and all was good. I slipped the drive back into my computer bag—a little deeper than it had been—and headed off to start another day at work.
It was some hours later that evening that I found myself at home, indulging in a well-deserved dinner of spareribs and scones. I plugged in said drive to access a few photos I needed for a project. This was the best drive to use as it had every photo I’d ever taken on it. I moved to the microwave to retrieve my dinner and sat down at my computer. I glanced at the screen where a message had appeared:
The disk in drive F is not formatted.
Do you want to format it now?
A feeling of discouragement settled over me like a fine mist. I simply sat and stared at the screen.
Instead of boring you with a trove of details and whatnot—telling you about all the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth—as well as calls to data recovery experts who would charge somewhere between $75 - $225 to retrieve the data (provided that there were no problems, and a bit more than that if there were) let’s instead skip those two days, and go to straight the part where the good news starts leading up to the happy ending…
I was ready to accept my losses, or fork out hundreds of dollars when I suddenly remembered that I had an external drive on which I’d backed up my photos a year ago—it wasn’t up-to-date, but it had the files as they were back in the start of 2009—albeit missing the summer of summers, and all the moments therein—including all of the recent images on my photography website, and shots of my class this year as well.
However, this was far better than what I had before, which was a great, big, steaming pile of nothing.
That’s when I remembered this. Ah, this little technological gem which, after running for 21 hours straight, allowed me access to the last year of photos which I promptly copied over to a new, larger hard drive via two days and several hours of sorting and organizing.
It is now Saturday evening. ComedySportz is on the docket tonight and 98.6% of my files are back where they should be, nestled securely on a new hard drive which will be backed up on a regular basis from now on.
Okay, so I made that number up. In reality, I don’t really know to what percentage my system is; after all, some of the old files were damaged, and time will only tell until I know the full extent of the restoration. But I do know this, the new drive looks an awful lot like the old one, and for that I am grateful
Thank heavens for backups and computer geek programs.
By the way, do you think that this might be a good time for me to encourage you to make a backup of your treasured memories? Preferably sooner than later?
