One Of My Worst Nightmares Became Reality

I don't want to sound over dramatic. But just over a week ago my external hard drive stopped working. Initially I didn't even worry about it, I thought that it just needed to be restarted, reconnected or the USB cord was broken. But after futile attempts at getting the HD to run by myself, I began to feel the first signs of panic.

I had yet to ask my brother, who is quite good with computers, for help. And I'm not going to lie, I did expect him to be able to fix it, as he's fixed any technology related problem I've ever come across. But alas, he couldn't do anything either (the HD couldn't even run disk recovery programs) and when I heard the dreaded words that the problem was most likely with the hardware. I knew was royally screwed.

So, I'm not sure of what the next step is. He's been asking his IT friends for suggestions of data recovery labs, but they don't know of any that are more than a gimmick ready to suck the money out of desperate people (aka me).

I've yet to even explain why losing the contents of this HD is my worst nightmare. It contains all the photos I've ever taken with my nikon. So that's nearly 7 years of photos gone. I am sentimental, and I didn't capture photos of every significant event in my life for no reason. So this loss is truly one of the worst things that could happen to me.

And before you get all high and mighty with my about making backups, trust me I've wanted to kick myself a million times for not having a back up. The fact is the external was originally the backup of all the photos I had on my computer, until I couldn't store any more photos on my computer, so I started moving them onto the external. I kept thinking to myself that I need to back it up, One copy of anything is never safe. I'm such a fool.

Love Lisa.