Could be worse
So, it's pretty much official that my external hard drive is a complete loss. Apparently the platter that contains the data doesn't spin anymore, so there's no way to get any data off of it without taking it out and mounting it into another machine. This involves clean rooms and big bucks. I might someday ship it off to the scary place to see if they can rescue anything (cuz not only doesn't the platter spin but I also probably put a pretty big ding into it), but it will be quite a while (if ever) before I can afford that step.
There's probably stuff on there that I don't even remember I had, so losing it won't be a big deal, I suppose. And for a long time I was religiously uploading my photos to photobucket, so not all is lost. Unfortunately I got lazy (my laptop is slow, and has a lot of troubles with photobucket), so many photos of this last year never made it there. Luckily I still have some of Hawaii on my extra memory card for my camera. I lost all of the photos my dad took on his cruise to Alaska. Luckily he has made prints of all of them, and isn't a very digital kind of guy (I was actually trying to transfer those photos onto a flash drive to use with a digital photo frame to give my dad for Christmas when I knocked my hard drive onto the floor).
The last few trips I've taken - San Diego, Portland and Vancouver, are almost complete losses. Never did get around to uploading them. I did print out some of them, so I have hard copies of my absolute favorites, but thats it.
Also lost is pretty much my entire iTunes library. 75% of that was off of cds, so it can be put back in, slowly, but the other 25% was purchased off of iTunes and is gone, including tv shows and movies. This won't be a huge problem until my ipod dies, as I have everything on there, but eventually this is going to bite. I'm just glad that I made backup cds of the hundreds of songs I downloaded off of internetarchive.org, as those have to go through two different conversion programs to become mp3s and represent many hours of work.
Anyway, it could be worse, and I certainly hope I've learned my lesson. I had actually had a second external hard drive for months, because it occurred to me that if anything happened to my first one I was screwed, but had never gotten around to putting anything on it. Now I make sure that everything is in at least 2 places at all times, if not more.
The one photo that was bugging me the most that I lost was the one I had taken of the impala in Vancouver. I know that the other girls got photos too and I could just get one of their's, bt it just wasn't the same to me. My brain was really fixated on losing that picture. Then, when I was trying to see if walgreens.com still had any of my dad's alaska pics in my account, I looked through my last photo album there and found my impala! I had printed it out in the last order I sent through, and they stil had it (they're pretty abitrary about which photo orders they keep in your online account, it seems). I'm not sure it's as high resolution of a file as it was originally , but I'll take any good news at this point.
