I feel...

like I have signed my life away...

You see, last week, my external hard drive decided to take a huge crap. As in it stopped working. Suddenly just started clicking. That just kinda spells disaster. So I sent it to a data recovery place. They come back and say... 

"Our tests indicate failure to the read/write head mechanism of your drive. Read/write head mechanism failure is one of the worst types of failures that can occur to a hard drive because of the difficulty in successfully overcoming the failure. Read/write head failures often lead to catastrophic head crashes that cause platter damage rendering your precious data unrecoverable instantly."

Do you see how my week started out? Let me play the scenario out for you...

Last Saturday, as my husband was packing for a week long business trip in Germany, I was sitting down to finish editing a wedding. My day was going good. I had my coffee and was getting ready to edit the last 4 or 5 photos and then put them on the cd for the happy couple. I plug in my hard drive and it starts humming but then it starts clicking and clicked maybe 5 times and then the hard drive would power down. I unplugged it and set it aside to deal with later seeing as how my husband was getting ready to walk out the door.

I know it seems crazy but whenever my husband leaves the country I get nervous, irritated, antsy, jubilant, good wifey and ask him if he has everything. You know the normal... socks, undies, t-shirts, shampoo, wash cloth, soap, deodorant, tooth brush, phone charger, money, foreign money, passport. Only once have I not asked him all this and that one time he only one clean pair of underwear. I laugh about it every time because the picture of my husband hand washing his undies in the sink every night is hilarious! So we go through our ritual and I see him off and get back to work.

So thinking the last time was a fluke I plug back in my hard drive and it does the same thing. I then run to the bathroom and become physically ill. Then I jump on the internet and get to work looking for someplace to recover my data. The whole time feeling like I'm looking for a witch doctor to heal some unseen mental imagined illness.

So we can fast forward a couple of days and some more physical illness episodes...

Wednesday I got the estimate for the data retrieval. $2199.00! What? Really? That much? Really? But what choice do I have? I don't know about other people but I don't have that kind of change just laying around. So I had to wait until my husband was back in the country and Mason and I were home to discuss our options.

I realize that it would be so much cheaper to just rent tuxes and get her dress cleaned and hair and makeup done again and do retakes. I know that sounds crass but the photos were generic. Totally generic! Not my favorite thing to do. But they wanted traditional. I know that the emotions on her face would very closely resemble the emotions of her wedding day because she would just be happy they would have photos to hang on the wall. And they might be able to laugh about it later but, BUT, all of Mason's baby photos are on there. EVERY SINGLE PHOTO. I have none on my laptop, none on my husband's computer, NONE. So I've set up a payment plan and should know if the retrieval is successful later this week.

I guess my advice for everyone would be to backup everything, and then back it up again, and then backup the backup. If anyone ever tells you that is crazy you can tell them about this idiot that didn't and lost everything...

Now I'm off to backup a couple of sessions I've done since then and then I'll backup my backup and get to work. After all I've got to pay for my failing...