Taking the Scenic Route

Since it doesn’t look like we will be able to retrieve the photos anytime soon, due to finances (although we did find a place where it will probably be around $400 instead of $2500, so that is good), so there are some photos that aren’t making it to the blog.

Our external hard drive, where we store ALL of our pictures (and the scrapbook pages I have spent hours on) and all of our videos, including heirloom pictures that we scanned in and no longer have access too, FAILED. It is a mechanical issue. (most likely a spindle motor failure…sad thing is, the very first Google result when you type in the problem is our exact drive.) The data is most likely still there, but it costs between $1200 – $2500 to recover it and nobody does it locally. The cheapest we have found so far is a place where we would pay to send the drive to them for them to diagnose how much it will be and charge us $65 just to tell us what the total bill would be.

Zach has been looking for a way to fix it, but so far, it looks like it requires a clean room/anti-static room to work on it, so it probably isn’t something we can do ourselves, especially since the data is so precious to us.

I have been sick for days. My fever returned about an hour ago, which means that my once a month, MUCH needed mom’s night out (autism support group meeting) is out. I haven’t been able to go to the gym for over 2 weeks now due to illness. We have no insurance (for the adults) since dh lost his job. We have very little money.

I am so sad. There are are around 15,000 pictures on there, not including the scanned photos, videos, and scrapbook pages.

I know there are worse things, but this sucks.

Any advice on data recovery related stuff would be welcome.

My photos are trapped on an external hard drive that appears to be having technical difficulties. We think it is a hardware issue (likely the arm broke) and are probably going to have to take it someplace that has clean room access to open it up and fix it. Ugh.

Sorry about the lack of posts. First my camera broke, which was depressing. Then we got the camera fixed and the computer broke. lol. The computer itself is ok, but all my photos are on a separate drive and the USB hub, where it connects with the computer, is messed up. We *think* the drive itself is ok, although we aren’t positive, but we can’t access the drive right now without a big mess, so we have to go get a new part. Hopefully that will be soon. Zach got paid today and we will see if the budget allows this week, or if it will be in two weeks from now.

If I have time later tonight and/or this weekend, I will start posting again.

I didn’t realize how many people read this until it went down for a while. So, thank you for noticing little ‘ole me on the great big web. Made me feel good.

#62 or… (one too) Many happy returns