Lesson Learned: Back-up your Back-up

I am obviously really behind on blogging. Partly because it is summer time and we have been busy having fun and trying to fit it all in before school starts again. And partly due to the fact that towards the end of May, the drive on our computer with ALL of our pictures crashed.

One day, while trying to upload to Picasa, I couldn't access our pictures folder on our media drive. I told Don (aka my technical support) and thought that for sure he would know how to access it, because he can pretty much figure out almost anything. But he couldn't get it either. Don said not to worry because even if it failed, we still have a copy of all of it on our back-up drive. Unfortunately, after checking the back-up drive we learned that it was making a perfect back-up of everything on Don's computer but only backing up the short cut to the media folder, not the actual pictures or video. Seriously, back-up your back-up. Computers are amazing but not totally reliable. We thought we had all our bases covered but we didn't. I didn't want to worry yet, because this sort of thing probably happened all the time, right? Somebody would probably have an easy fix. Don said he would take it to one of his tenants that did this kind of thing for his job. This guy opened up the drive, scanned it and found nothing. Then, we both started to panic. Our media drive has everything on it--pictures of both of us as kids, our dating, our marriage, our kids being born, first steps, vacations and every event from the past ten years. Plus, all of our videos--including our kids' births and their first words and giggles--were on it too. I was sick about it. Those memories are irreplaceable. If we had a fire, that is what I would grab. We decided it was worth the cost to try and get them back. We checked into some data recovery places and found this place in Logan that does a lot of work for the colleges and big corporations. They told us that if there was any information on it, they would find it. They had to take it into a clean room and go through the whole drive. After a couple of weeks of wondering and waiting...thankfully, we got it all back. We are both so grateful! Lesson learned. We now back-up into the cloud, have burned DVDs of each year of pictures and have learned that the external drives from Costco were not meant for that amount of data storage. I'm just so glad to have all of our pictures back. The only bad thing is that now I have a lot of catch up to do. :)