crashed!

It appears that my hard drive has crashed. At the moment, I'm on Cyn's computer, but this is not pleasant. I guess I'll go out and buy a new computer tomorrow, and will soon be back to normal, except for one thing. I was horrified to see that I haven't done a back up since last freaking October.

Ten months ago. I seem to have lost every photo I've taken since Thanksgiving. Except the ones I've fixed up and uploaded somewhere. And I haven't fixed up many in the last couple of months. I didn't do anything with the pictures from the air show, for example, and I just deleted them from the card on friday. I do still have whatever remains on my three memory cards. Not sure if that includes the ones from our Chicago trip.

And of course there are other documents. I may have to take it to a data recovery specialist. I understand they charge through the nose.

October! I knew it had been a while, but I was guessing six months. But aside from that, I really blew it. I was uploading pics from this weekend, and I kept getting "out of memory messages". I deleted other files to make room, but it was still a bit of a struggle to get everything in. I knew I had to back it up and clear it out, but I was itching to look at photos. Then, I got the "no bootable device" message. I shut it down and tried it again, and it booted up just fine. The next day - nothing. If I'd realized just what "no bootable device" meant, I would have freaked out and started backing everything up. And not powered the thing down.

So back your shit up!

new computer

I purchased a new computer at Best Buy tonight. Unfortunately, it won't be ready for me until tomorrow night.

Once I have the new one set up, I can install the broken hard drive in it, and then try to retrieve the files. My friend Derek thinks we have a chance to get the files, by just going in and poking around. If that doesn't work, we can try recovery software. I'm pretty certain that will work, if the first option doesn't.