Today we learnt a very hard lesson. You always think “this” or “that” can’t happen to you …. but sooner or later it catches up and does just that….it happens to you.
It all started one dark and stormy night (minus the stormy part). I was tucked in bed drifting off to sleep when Jason came in and whispered…..”I am getting a blue screen on my laptop with an error message and it isn’t booting up” AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! The blue screen of death!!!! No not now! Not when we had so many pictures on that laptop….pictures of JBear in the hospital when he was born, Christmas, Easter, trips to the zoo!!
Okay – let’s not panic (but inside I was a screaming lunatic). We can take it to a computer place and I am sure they can work their magic and save those precious memories.
It took less than 24 hours for me to get the call: “uhhh yeah – your hard drive is fried so there’s nothing we can do”. Was now a good time to panic….what the hell…it was as good a time as any.
My voice raised an octave or two or four as I ask “Can you save the pictures?!”
The reply was calm, simple and devastating all at the same time “no”.
I could hear myself ask “Is there anything else you can do??…any trick??”
As the words left my mouth, I knew it was futile. What was I thinking?! That this guy was some sort of wizard, that he could actually save all those pictures but was choosing not to???
I knew his answer before he even said it: “no”.
And with that one word, my shoulders hunched, my heart broke, and a sigh of sheer devastation quietly filled my tiny office.
I texted Jason – broke the news to him the only way I knew how….”The hard drive is fried – we lost all our pictures…(profanity)”.
Jason thinks that he may have backed everything up to disk so the glimmer of hope is still there. Tonight I have resigned myself to the fact that I will most likely tear the house apart in hopes of finding the disk.
Giving up is not in my nature so we now have a couple of options: send it to a recovery place (which costs approx. $1000) to get the pictures back, hold onto the computer and hope that as technology improves there will be a way to recover files off a fried hard drive, or (if all else fails) my neighbor said if we put the hard drive in the freezer for a while we may get it to work just long enough for us to rescue those pictures. What the heck…we have nothing to lose. Technology….you giveth and you taketh away.
So as we battle away at this, I will leave you all with this: BACK UP YOUR FILES TODAY!!!! Don’t put it off. Don’t wait another day. You will regret it.
Our Life In Action 