Always make sure your backups have redundancy.
Smoke+Silicon=your're data is done.
Experience told me that the tier 1 level professionals couldn’t help me any more than what I had done. I wanted to have at least said to myself that I tried, but when I smelled the smoke of my hard drive stink up the poor computer repair store’s display room I knew there wasn’t much more to be done…
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This weekend I learned to obey an important rule in network management. Always have redundancy. I have always heeded this in my professional life. I always make sure that when I build a server for anyone I always make sure there are at least two hard drives. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow my own advise at home. I had an external drive, but it wasn’t so much a back up drive as it was THE drive. Also unfortunate is that we have been having power spikes at our house and one just happened to hit while I was using said external drive. Well, like all things there are consequences. In this case the consequences were that I lost a lot of important documents including my budget and 10 years worth of digital pictures. Luckily, I do have a little bit of experience with data recovery and I was able to salvage some of the pictures, but most of it was lost. Oh well, just another lesson learned.
It’s hard to believe that so much of our lives is now in a tiny little hard drive. How awful to lose so much data and pictures! It’s like losing part of your life! You have my deepest sympathies.
I do see some silver lining to this black cloud. It’s been an encouragement to John to gather all the random hard drives from all the random, limping, computers, and is pulling all the pictures off them. Also, it’s sort of a relief not to have ALL the documentation for the past few years. A few treasured memories and pictures, is better, in my estimation, then 4,000+ pictures where you can’t even find the one you are thinking of.
If anyone has any good engagement pictures of Denise and I. I am still looking for those.