Gone

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An update on my other post about los­ing my hard drive and my lap­top. I got the call from best buy today, and they want $1350-$1500 to fix the exter­nal drive.

??

So I will obvi­ously be not get­ting the exter­nal drive fixed.

It’s really upset­ting because that was quite lit­er­ally every­thing dig­i­tal I had saved over the last 14 years or so. Every. Last. Thing.

And now it’s gone.

However, I have my wed­ding pho­tos on CD. And I have my WIP novel. I’d be a lit­tle more dev­as­tated if I lost those two things. The writ­ing hurts, but to be hon­est most of it was crap from when I was a teenager. Going for­ward with my writ­ing, I’ll just have to write all new stuff instead of revis­ing all the old stuff like I planned. It’s not so bad.

I’m sad about los­ing our pic­tures. But as my hus­band said, we never looked at them any­way, and there were so many that it was hard to do so if we wanted to. We have a few printed out, and he has some on his com­puter. I’ll miss them, but we still have the mem­o­ries. And I have some copies of a few on face­book, even if they’re poor quality.

The rest, the old web­site ver­sions and back­ups, old sims saves, and I don’t even know all of it, I’m not too upset over. I had too much junk on there any­way that I needed to sort. The music isn’t lost, I just have to re-burn all the CDs, or not. I have the stuff I lis­ten to now on this com­puter so I may not bother.

I feel like I should have learned some­thing from all this. Obviously I need to back up my back­ups, because when the main com­puter dies, then the backup dies before I can re-install every­thing, I lose all of it. I don’t want to lose it all a sec­ond time. Except, I’d lose much less.

But what else? That I held on to too much old junk? I do that in my offline life too.

Question to the read­ers: Is there a sil­ver lin­ing to all this?

10 thoughts on “Gone”

  1. Hm…a sil­ver lin­ing to los­ing every­thing on your exter­nal hard drive? It could be that it was just your exter­nal hard drive that got destroyed — it could have been your house. I guess that what I am say­ing is that you could have lost some­thing of much greater value, both emo­tion­ally and mate­ri­ally. I admit that it was a blow to lose all of your pho­tos, your writ­ings, etc. but you have got to ask your­self — do I need pho­tos to remind me of cer­tain mem­o­ries? Was I ever actu­ally going to edit my old works? Again, I guess that it is a mat­ter of per­spec­tive. *hugs* I am truly sorry that you lost every­thing on your exter­nal hard drive though.

    • That’s true. It’s still upset­ting, but at least it was just dig­i­tal files.

  2. I’m really sorry that you lost every­thing on your hard drive. It has hap­pened to me before too and it sucks. I find that ridicu­lously expen­sive of Best Buy to want to fix it. I feel like some­one should be able to fix it for much cheaper than that. Have you tried going to a ran­dom com­puter repair shop or com­puter repair ser­vice­man that isn’t Best Buy and see­ing if they can fix it just as a last resort?

    • It does. I haven’t asked around any­where else after they told me how much would be involved in fix­ing it, but when I did the ini­tial search to take it in, Best Buy had the same price for data recov­ery as the other places in town I checked (includ­ing an inde­pen­dent shop and Staples). Staples has the same $1500 price listed for exten­sive phys­i­cal data recov­ery, which is what mine would need. :(

  3. I wish I could give you a solu­tion. I am quite lucky that my boyfriend keeps many copies of my cur­rent com­puter on dif­fer­ent dri­ves. I am sur­prised that there isn’t away for you to save every­thing. Question: is the drive in a con­tainer? Can the drive be removed out of the box? If the answer is yes, you still have a chance to save it. The con­tainer could be cor­rupted. You might want to try and another exter­nal hard­drive con­tainer. If you have tried or thought about it, that’s fine. I was just think­ing about ideas my boyfriend does for me.

    Silver lin­ing? As the first per­son who com­ment here, be glad it wasn’t some­thing worse. Hoping for the best for you.

    • It just so hap­pened that every­thing failed all at once, in the mid­dle of buy­ing a house and mov­ing out of/cleaning our old apart­ment, start­ing a sec­ond job and mov­ing into the new house. It’s in a plas­tic con­tainer, and I think that’s what best buy wanted to do to it that would costs $1500. I just don’t have the money for that (because of just hav­ing bought a house) and my hus­band doesn’t want to take it apart and risk dam­ag­ing it more in case the data can be saved at a later date.

  4. I’ve had the same thing hap­pen to me, and I was def­i­nitely in tears about it. (I was also 15 at the time, and my entire life prac­ti­cally existed on that exter­nal: designs I had made, lists of things to do, a ton of pho­tos, copies of school­work from my middle-school and high-school days, my exten­sive col­lec­tion of Japanese pop, etc.) Looking back, though, I guess it really taught me the impor­tance of back­ing up back­ups (haha) and also decid­ing what was really, truly impor­tant to me. I really feel for your loss, but now you can focus on mak­ing more new mem­o­ries to join the old ones :)

    • That’s the atti­tude I’m tak­ing with it, just learn to back up the back­ups no mat­ter how long it takes, and that life goes on.

  5. That sucks! -_-; The radio show I lis­ten to in the morn­ing is always push­ing carbonite.com’s online backup, and they’re not the only one. So per­haps it won’t hap­pen again if that option works for you? I’m lucky, I mar­ried my com­puter guy! :P But when he’s not look­ing I have screwed things up before.

    • I mar­ried mine, too. :P I just have bad luck with elec­tron­ics. I’m think­ing of going the old fash­ioned paper and also DVD backup route, and sav­ing the really impor­tant things online to google docs. Having copies of things in more than one place is what I need to do.