No Words

The other night I was working on the computer and I had my external hard drive hooked up. My drive holds every picture I have taken since 2008. This particular drive has to be plugged into the computer by a USB cable and plugged into the wall outlet. While I was working, Hunter came running past and tripped over the cord causing my drive to crash onto the ground. I completely panicked fearing I had lost all of my pictures. Luckily I plugged the drive back in and it worked.

This drive is priceless to me. I can't leave my house without putting it in our safe for fear of fire or theft (I work in insurance, this is where my mind is at 24/7). So why I have never "backed up" my photos is a question I keep asking myself.

Even though my drive still worked, I was paranoid of losing those pictures so I went and bought another external hard drive. I started coping all my pictures over. I have them all sorted by years. I started with 2008 and worked up. I was on my last folder "2012" when it started acting funny, so I clicked "cancel" and that was it...my drive will no longer show up on my computer.

I searched for help in every direction on what to do. I was instructed to take it to a computer shop in a neighboring town. Andy dropped it off and on Friday they called to say they were unable to retrieve any of my files. (Insert Breakdown Here). I was hysterical. These are all the pictures of the first 6 months of Weston's life...GONE!!! How could I be so stupid to not back all these pictures up prior.

But then it came to mind that they guy said they couldn't retrieve the files because it wouldn't show up on their computer either. No Crap!!! But that was it, they didn't try anything else. I did research online for any other option. There is clearly something wrong with my drive and it needs broken down and hopefully fixed. There was two companies I contacted to see if they could help. In the end, I am going to 24 Hour Data Recovery. They have a 99% success rate to recover files and the tech on the phone was sooo helpful and reassuring. Unfortunately, it is going to cost us between $750 and $2,000!!! Yes, you read that right. CRAZY!!!! Depending on how much extensive work needs done on the drive to get it back working to get my files off. If they can't help me then clearly there is no cost.

So tomorrow, I am off to Fedex to ship off my drive for one last hope of recovering my photos. Fingers, toes, legs and eyes all crossed!!!

I beg you all right now to go buy an additional drive and back up all those precious price-less pictures you have. You do not want to be in my position!!

Side Note: My drive was a 1TB. Apparently this is really big. I only had about 50 GB of photos. So the cost to recover my photos is based off of that my drive has a 1TB capacity because files are not saved on the drive as organized as I viewed them. So they literally have to go through all 1TB to find my 50 GB of data. So when you go by a drive, it isn't necessary to buy such a large one and in the event you ever have to have data recovered, it will be cheaper for you. Just saying.