Thursday, December 10, 2009

A Final Word About Hard Drives...I Promise

My husband.

My oh my, that man gets me every single time.

In response to my tear-laden afternoon, my sweet hubs took to the phones to try and come up with some way to salvage our beloved pictures. We had (reluctantly) agreed to let go of everything else (PTO stuff? book I've been writing off and on? hand-picked music selection?) but hadn't fully given in to the loss of our pictures and the Rizz was trying desperately to figure it out. Another call back to the good people at DriveSavers revealed that we did have one more option. We could go for a jpeg retrieval and welcome home our pictures. The techs stated that they had found over 4000 jpegs on the drive so far (which made me cry even more because I had no idea there were that many images on there) and that we could pay one price and get every. single. image they found back.

Back!

It's still expensive ($850) and it still kills me to pay for something we already own but it's worth it. Worth it to see my beautiful babes at every second of their life. Worth it to relive the wonderful moments I've had with my husband. Worth it to know that my children will have their entire childhoods to look back on. Worth it.

My dear husband also purchased two (two!) external hard drives yesterday that will run together and back up our life from here on out. If one should fail us again, we'll be ready. Boo hiss, hard drive!

I've had lots of questions as to how this happened. How an external hard drive could fail and cause us to lose everything in one fell swoop. If it had happened at any other time, we would have been fine. Everything would have still be on our computer. But this massive hard drive suicide happened at the exact worst moment.

Brad was busy backing everything up to the hard drive because we had gotten the new Windows 7 and he was prepping to install it, which meant reformatting the computer. After copying every single file to the hard drive, he went about installing the new program. In the few hours that our entire life sat on the hard drive, the crash of 2009 happened. When Brad went to the external hard drive to start reinstalling everything, he discovered it's death. It's horrifyingly timed death.

So that's how it happened.

My husband is incredibly smart. He checks and rechecks things so that something like this could never happen. But it did. And it taught us a few things. And it showed us to hone in on what's important (the actual moments and not just the pictures that captured the moments) And that no matter what, whether there's physical proof or not, our family is amazing. And we create beautiful memories. And sometimes those memories are captured on film.

And sometimes, they're not.


8 comments:

Heather said...

YAY! 8 days of subbing... totally worth it!!! Go Brad!

Marilyn said...

Karen, that would be one of the worst feelings ever. But, thank goodness that there is some way (even if it is costly) to get those images back. I would have cried and cried and cried too.

I back up my important files (music, pics, etc.) once a month onto an external, but had never even considered the external drive failing...something for me to think about!

Kelly said...

Hooray for Brad and retrievable jpegs. Still expensive, but really you can't put a price tag on family pictures. Love and miss you!!

vwbabe said...

Yea!!! I am so glad!! Go Brad, you are a rockstar.

Trevor and Sara said...

That is the BEST news!!!

Amy said...

It's a Christmas miracle! A very expensive one, but a miracle no less! Yay!

Darin said...

We also back up all pictures to cd every few months. I'm glad you got your life back though! Yay for caring husbands.

Linda Richards said...

I did raise a fine son, didn't I?