Living in Technological Hell for the Last 2 Weeks

1) After a week of scans and diagnostics, my personal laptop's hard disk was officially declared fried last Friday, and while I knew it was beginning to fail weeks ago, I had begun to frantically try moving everything I had on it to a very new, very large, supposedly very stable 1TB external drive kept in my office at work. There were only 350 picture files remaining on my laptop, all from November and December, all of which refused to move or copy from the laptop due to cyclic redundancy errors. In the end, after several data recovery scans run by IT and a certain saint-like, professional computer guru friend of mine, only 1/2 of them were successfully recovered; so far, it seems I've lost everything since December 20th, which includes our baby girl's first Christmas and our New Years pics.

2) Meanwhile, my office computer, which was purchased December 15 of last year, brand spakin' new, Windows 7, not even two months old, it began to do strange things as well, beginning nearly 2 weeks ago... but until last week, I couldn't say exactly what was wrong, if anything really.

3) And the 1TB external drive I had used to back everything up? Well, on January 27th, I had moved all our original January pictures directly from my digicam's memory card to the drive, plus back up duplicates of our Christmas and New Years taken from a 16GB jump drive I generally use for jpg back ups. Wednesday morning, January 27th, all those picture files and then some, they were all there, entirely intact. The following morning, they weren't to be found, and I have NO IDEA what the freak happened!!! And the 'data recovery back up' feature for the drive? The program files are corrupt. IT has been running scans on the drive since Friday the 29th, and the last scan took 4 full days to run. As of this past Friday, none of my pictures have been recovered yet, not a single jpg file.

4) The same day my 1TB drive went all wacky and all my pictures had disappeared, along with, might I add, 270 GB of additional office and personal data, , my office computer refused to recognize my login profile. I called IT for help that day, but they were short-staffed. After twiddling my thumbs for 2 days, struggling on an old loaner laptop, IT came to my office last Tuesday, ran some tests, deemed my office computer profile corrupt, said they could fix it, tried to fix it, rebooted the thing twice, and then they too were locked out of my computer. Everything else they tried, failed. IT took it away that day and I haven't heard a thing since.

I'm happy we have all our November pics and we have all that we'd taken up until December 20th, which includes Thanksgiving, when we had the angel boy-O here for 4 days and 5 nights. That's great, yes! BUHHT, I'm still super sad about our Christmas, New Years and January pics. [SIDE NOTE: On January the 29th, when I'd discovered the pictures had disappeared, just as I was about to burn them all to DVDs, I bawled and bawled, as if someone had died.] Those pictures included images of our baby girlie beginning to walk along our furniture, and her first trip up the stairs and her first trip down the stairs, her first moments of unmistakable dancing and singing, and the first time we found her standing against her crib rail in the morning, and her receiving her very first dolly, giving it a hug, and her first experience with snow and riding in a sled, and her first experience deliberately singing/making noise into microphone... We also had pictures of the angel boy-O singing and watching Signing Times along with his baby sissy, held on his lap. We had pictures of him kissing her goodnight, and pictures of him bouncing in a bouncy house with his baby sis sliding down the bouncy slide in his lap. And pictures of him trying to feed her while she sat in her high chair. We have theses memories still, but I want the pictures too.

For Valentine's Day this year, my honey-man bought me a replacement hard disk for my laptop. We'll see how the installation goes this week. And if it works, I'll have a lot of pictures posting to catch up on over at our family blog. And some kitty pics to share here. *sigh*

MY RECOMMENDATION: Back up ALL your photo files to DVD immediately if you haven't already done so!