Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Bits of February

I don't have a lot of pics to share from Instagram in February. Don't let that photo on the bottom left fool you; we've had lots of snow and ice and yucky winter weather that's made it difficult to get out and take pictures or do anything fun really. And honestly, even when we did go out, I was too cold to bother with much of anything other than walking as quickly as I could to our destination.

Actually, February was not awesome for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that my computer died, hence the crickets heard here on the blog. I tried to fix it for a couple of days but was unsuccessful. I ended up wiping my hard drive and restoring it back to factory settings to get it up and running (albeit slowly) as a bare bones machine until we could get a new computer, which we did last week,

I was super excited to finally have a new computer, but in the process of getting it all set up, I discovered that the external hard drive I'd been backing up to for the past couple of years failed to recover anything after about July 2013. I tried two different data recovery programs and contacted the manufacturer for help as well. I'm afraid my only option at this point is a professional data recovery service, and they are pretty expensive. I looked at one near us, and they charge $149 just for the initial analysis, and I'm not sure how much they charge for the actual data recovery, but I know it's not cheap.

Ultimately, if the drive failed to back up in the first place, if it stopped working at some point even though it kept showing "backup successful" each time, then data recovery won't help. They can't recover what was never saved to begin with, right?

I know I'm not the first person this has happened to, but it is pretty devastating to lose a year and a half of work as well as personal documents and photos. I lost so many photos from last summer in particular--ones that I'd never shared here--that were really important to me. So yeah, it sucks. I'm trying to just make peace with it and move forward.

By the way, they aren't kidding when they say that you should back up everything in at least 2 places outside your computer. I used to do that and then just got out of the habit at some point. It's ironic that the data that was successfully retrieved from my external hard drive is the same data I already had backed up elsewhere, and the data it failed to retrieve from the last year and a half was only saved on the external hard drive and my computer, which both failed at the same time.

I know I only have myself to blame for that, but if you can learn from my mistakes, please do! I wouldn't want this to happen to anyone else.

Anyway, here's hoping March looks a little brighter. xo, Mary

8 comments:

  1. Aw drat, Mary. I can relate to your lost data. It sucks big time. I cried about it (videos we made of Oliver when he was a baby - GONE) but our story had a happy ending: we shelled out the cash for the recovery and got it all back.

    We are looking forward to warmer days over here on the west coast of Canada too!

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    1. Thanks for sharing that, Melissa! That gives me hope. I probably will cough up the money for data recovery...maybe not right now since we just spent a lot on the new computer...but when I can. If I don't do it, I'll wonder whether I should have forever. :/

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  2. Yeah February wasn't that exciting for me neither. That stinks about losing some of your stuff. Have you considered a cloud service like Dropbox? I don't have a backup external drive but have been relying more on cloud storage, it may not be the best way to do things but it's easy when I need to access something from different devices.

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    1. Yeah going forward I will definitely be using online storage in addition to a new external hard drive as having at least two (in addition to your computer) is the only way to really be safe. Most people won't have everything fail at once like I did, but obviously it does happen because it happened to me. :(

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  3. Oh, bummer!!!
    I only back up to one external hd too. Thanks for the reminder...off to checkout some other options now.

    Here's hoping spring is somewhere just around the corner!

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  4. Oh wow. That's awful. I wouldn't be happy either. I'm so sorry that happened! I hope you're able to find a way to recover your data. Big hugs.

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  5. Oh nooooo. I'm so sorry to hear that. The Dell I used in college had a total meltdown after I graduated and I lost a lot of pictures, too. In fact, that situation is what made me switch over to Macs forever.

    Anyway, I hope you find a way to recover everything. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you.

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  6. i feel your pain.. i so wait when that happens.. it fact since it has happened to me i try to make a point of backing up my computer on an external hard drive once every few months.. it's tedious but so worth it.

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