Digital Pictures are my Bane!

Do you want to know the reason I started the offsite backup branch of Sensible Gurus (www.sensiblegurus.info)

Do you want to know the real reason?

Digital Pictures, there I said it, Digital Pictures.

I screwed up. Plain and simple. I switched my wife’s computer from a Desktop to a Laptop, and stored the desktop in the basement. I asked, “Hon, is everything you need on your new computer?”…

Flash forward 7 months, right around Christmas… where my wife wanted to print out a collage for Grandma, and she goes to her computer where she kept the digital pictures she sent out for printing, and they were gone!!! No worries I thought, grab the hard drive from the basement, plug it into a USB Adapter and *click click click*

For you non-techies out there… *click click click* is… bad, real bad

I tried every trick in the book… Freezer trick, mallet trick, Spin-Rite, SysInternals, I spent over 100 hour trying to recover data from that disk! Nothing!

My wife even wrenched it from my hands and brought it to her work where her cousin works as their IT manager (It’s a Fortune 1000 company, and in the top quarter) and tried to get it working there, spending precious corporate time… nada.

I have backups, I have all the RAW images stored on my Desktop, a backup USB Disk, and DVD’s… but I don’t have her edits and selections. To go through my database of pictures…. You are looking at over 200 gigs worth of data…

Yeah… I’m in the doghouse, still! I printed out some pictures for my kids “Marvelous me” week at school (isn’t kindergarten grand!) and… some of the pictures I printed out were not in any of the photo albums we own. Sleeping on the couch again!

Anyway… since this happened, I have

a) Shadow Protect doing daily snapshots

b) The “Sensible Online Backup” backuping up the critical files (the my documents, my pictures, my favorites, etc, and the oh so looked over .nk2 file)

Just so this doesn’t happen EVER again!