So...
My hard drive is toast. They were not able to recover anything. I've had myself a couple good cries over it today, but I'm trying to look on the bright side - I do have the best of my photos on the blog, so if nothing else, I can save the blog versions. They probably won't be great quality, but at least they're there.
Y'all, if you do not somehow back up your stuff, or at least your photos, please don't be stupid like I was. A few of my albums are on Shutterfly (my brother says I can get the high res versions back), Facebook (low res), and the blog (not really sure what quality I can recover). But I lost TONS of my photos. We don't have the disks for Microsoft Office 2007, Photoshop, and I lost all of my actions I bought in Jonah's Auction for Photoshop... not to mention all the documents and spreadsheets and videos (oh, the videos!!!) I lost. Most of Jonah's last ten months are gone, as far as having the original versions of things. It will take me hours (days, weeks!) to get back what I've lost, and even then, it will only be partial recovery. I am heartbroken. :(
Anyway, starting right now, I'm backing everything up. My brother (my go-to on all things computer) says he uses Dropbox. It's free for a basic account (2 GB), but you can earn more space by referring others or you can pay to upgrade (a monthly fee). Basically, you sign up for a free account, download it, and it puts a little blue folder icon on your taskbar. Then, I think it's as easy as drag and drop to back up your stuff. I don't want this to ever happen again. It's horrible.
Anyway, click HERE if you are interested in Dropbox. It's my referral code and I will earn some extra space if you go through me. Or you can just go to http://dropbox.com to sign up. Don't be an idiot! (You know, like some people I know... ahem.)
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
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33 comments:
You could get an external drive like My Book. It isn't too expensive. We have one set up to back up our hard drive every day at 10am. It takes a snapshot of what has changed on your hard drive from one day to the next and copies it. Just a suggestion you might want to check out. I am so sorry. I sobbed when we found out we didn't have a video (like we thought) of our first daughter's first birthday. I am soooo sorry.
Oh I can't even imagine... sorry just doesn't cut it.
We make our blog into a blurb book... for each year and the quality is great. It's our family album for each year.
I would be devastated if I lost our photos but posting them on the blog I know I have the moments captured online.
So sorry to hear you lost everything :( I have some saved to CD's but not all. I will def save them now. Good luck in recovering your files
We back up to an external hard drive as well. Really though, I need to start printing out the photos I want to keep and doing something with them. I lost all our Christmas photos one year when my stupid craptop up and died on me.... so I understand!
That really bites!
Since you use blogger, I would suggest going to picasa and try signing in with the same credentials that you use for your blog. I did this by chance when I was exploring better options for where to store pictures online in an organized manner, and saw that all the photos I had uploaded directly through my blog were in a folder there. Apparently blogger and picasa are related. If that is the case, you can also download the good quality version. I could be wrong, because when I realized how much easier it was to upload directly to picasa and just embed the links from there, I stopped uploading through my blog and straight into picasa. It offers a TON of free space. I just used mine up two weeks ago and bought a ridiculous amount more for $5 per year. Yep, pretty darn cheap! I have made it a practice to just always upload all of my favorites to my picasa account as a backup since it is so easy, and that way they are ready for me to blog when I am ready.
Hope you can get a good amount of your pics back!
I'm coming out of the shadows...if you upload via the blogger upload tool {as bad as it is} then they are all stored in a picasa album through your google account in full high resolution. I love that my blog pictures all all automatically backed up offsite when I post them. Good luck.
Yep, as others said, you should have all the photos you uploaded to the blog on Picasa. And as I said, I've got tons of pictures of you guys I'm happy to put on CD and mail to you or bring at Christmas.
NOT THAT THAT MAKES IT ANY LESS DEVASTATING, I should have added.
I've posted here a few times, but this made me come out of the woodwork too. I'm so sorry about your computer and the loss of even one photo. We thought this happened to us too once, but we were able to recover it all. Picasa will have all your blog pictures, but we too bought an external hard drive that backs up automatically every day. Just yesterday I mentioned that for my piece of mind, I would like to look into a another off site back up. No wonder the Bible teaches us to "store up our treasures in Heaven." (-:
We continue to pray for Jonah and your family. And now, your computer.
check out Ebay for new copies of Office, Photoshop, etc... I got a brand new copy of MS Office Professional 2007 for $40 on Ebay once! It sells for $200 in stores!!!!
but I know how you feel. most of Sami's baby pic from birth-4 months are the size of a 1x1 inch square but i re-sized them and no one told me to save the original as is:( it sucks, but like you said, you live and learn!
I would cry, too, but you have all those wonderful memories in your mind and heart!
I use Carbonite which backs everything up automatically (and frequently). It wasn't very expensive (may $50 a year?). I have had to retrieve items from it and have been SO grateful that I can do it. Worth checking into.
Janet
I order photos from Costco and have uploaded a pile so there are copies there. You didn't by chance order any hard copies anywhere, did you? Because then you probably have albums at the places you used--Walmart, Target, etc.
So sorry this happened to you.
At least know you're not alone...I had the same thing happen to me-we caught a virus and my husband was going to take it in to get wiped clean..i told him to save all the picture folders. He forgot the shared folder which I kept EVERYTHING in. (He save those stupid sample photos though...) All my pictures and videos I had of my sister Sue before she died, I lost. I cried too...at least it couldn't wipe away the memories...
How horrible to loose everything!! We use an external hard drive (~$150 from MacWorld) & I back up my photos to Shutterfly each month.
Be careful using Dropbox...it isn't protected at all. We use it at work to share non-private things, but it can very easily be hacked into. Just something to think about.
Files can almost ALWAYS (98% of the time) be recovered from a fried hard drive. We lost ALL of our videos of Katie when our HD failed. I brought it to a data recovery place and for the unreasonable, insane price of 800.00 they recovered everything. It's ridiculously expensive, but it is doable if you can swing the cost.
Ugh, I feel your pain...the same thing just happened to me! Luckily I have a friend who's an IT guy and he was able to somehow get access to most of my stuff so that I could pull it off onto an external harddrive. I highly recommend purchasing an external harddrive...it's not really all that expensive and then I keep it in my fireproof lock box under my bed...I like knowing that everything is right there and could be in my hands in seconds if need be!
So sorry to hear this! I would truly be devastated if this happened!
Just as a thought...if you have low quality pictures, when you do go and try to print them, I would rec. using mpix.com. I've used that a couple of times with lower quality pictures, and they typically come out pretty good. mpix is a semi-pro photo printing site. (My high res. pictures come out AWESOME-way nicer than from Walmart or Sams) It is a bit more expensive than Shutterfly, but might be worth a try. Plus, they often send out coupon codes.
Good luck!
Same thing happened to me in December.
Let's take a moment of silence to remember our computers that died taking all of our BELOVED PICTURES THAT WE FORGOT TO BACK UP!
And then Thank God, that we uploaded the very best to Flickr so we could post them on our blogs.
I am sorry for your loss.
PS. When I bought a replacement, I also bought an external hard drive and back up my pictures monthly.
I want to cry for your loss! My husband, a computer nerd, strongly suggests a second or even third computer diagnosis!
so sorry for your loss. i feel all of your pain. our laptop died once on my birthday, i cried and cried and cried. we lost soo much stuff. i have instituted a triple backup plan. i recently saw 4GB flash drives on sale at walmart for 10 bucks. i bought a few and put all of lucas'(my 17 mo old) pics and videos on them and then they went right into the fireproof box with our marriage certificate, passports and wedding pics. i have them backed up on the computer too but just added a triple backup. i know you'll be the backup queen from now on, sorry the lesson was so painful.
I am so sorry. I cant even imagine.
Yup, external hard drive and an online source to save your stuff.
I use Picasa and an external hard drive.
I'm sorry. I found out that my husband accidentally threw away our daughter's ultrasound photos, and even though most of them had been scanned into the computer, not all had, and the rest are gone for good.
Oh, I am soooo sorry! Our hard drive crashed when my oldest was about a year old, and we lost about 7 months worth of pictures. I did have some on Picasa, but not a lot. I was really angry with my husband at first for not backing up (I thought he had been), but I realized that it could have just as easily been me...I was still so sad though.
We now use Mozy, as well as an external hard drive, and we back up regularly!
I hate that! I made my mom get an external hard drive. She got My Book and loves it. It keeps all of her photos, documents, etc. She got it at Wal-Mart.
I back up my photos on CDs and Picasa. Like another commenter said, Blogger and Picasa are related. You use the same username and password that you do for Blogger. It's free to download if you don't already have it on your computer.
I am so sorry to hear this news. I know how awful you must be feeling over this. I've also learned the hard way about backing up files. I use a Western Digital Book for them now. (Actually, it is more like "books"... I have a lot of files!)
Do you have the damaged hard drive in your possession? If so, there are places that can repair destroyed hard drives. They don't simply try to recover the data like a regular repair shop would. These companies will reassemble, remount, and do other things to the drive to make it run at least temporarily. It can be mounted as a slave to remove the stress of it running the operating system, and important files can be recovered.
Obviously, this is something that will be expensive. You'll need to pick a reputable company as well. However, you can often get back much of what you've lost. Hard drives are somewhat protected, and it is most likely that something in the mechanisms was jarred or broken in the drive. If the person working on it is experienced, they can often fix this.
Again, I'm sorry that you have to deal with this.
Oh no!!!! I am SO very sorry! That must be so heartbreaking. =*( I lost thousands of pictures of my oldest from when she was little. I was a teen Mom and broke. I took tons of pictures but couldn't afford to get them developed. When I got married and had the funds, I took TONS of pictures and most didn't come out at all because the film was so old. I remember how sad I felt. It must be even worse loosing videos too! I hope you end up finding ways to get copies of a lot of them. I have a My Book external harddrive and really like it. Just plug it in to my lap top and drag my picture folder over and it copies. Again, I am SOOO sorry this happened!
I am so so sorry this happened!! :(
My neighbor had taken her toast hardrive somewhere, and they said they couldn't recover it, but then she took it somewhere else, and they said there was a possibility! Have you tried more than one place?
I hope there is a way for you to get all of it back....that is a BIG deal, all those pictures and videos. :(
My experience with Dropbox is awesome...we use it for work, but I had no idea you could back up pictures there. After almost losing all of our pictures once, I'm kind of a back-up picture freak...always looking for another way.
Oh, I'm so sorry Patrice! I've just started to become regular about backing up stuff myself--but not comprehensively. I may try to sign up for Dropbox just to make sure you get some more space!
Best wishes with the recovery! With photos (I'm not a big video person), I also try to leave them on my camera until I've printed them as another form of back-up--just an idea if you have space.
If you still have your hard drive, my husband would be happy to give you a second opinion about recovering your info. He is pretty good with computers and we live about 30 min. north of Greensboro, so it would be pretty convenient for him to check it out for you.
Just trying to help!
Donna
THERE IS A WAY TO RECOVER THE PICTURES!!!
Don't throw the computer in the trash yet.
www.drivesavers.com
I used them when I fried my external hard drive that had all my pictures backed up on it.
It is not cheap...but can you put a price on those pictures? Well, sometimes you can, but if you can afford it....there is hope!!
Good luck.
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