I swear. For as much as I love my computer(s) and blogging and all things electronic, right now I feel like I want to go live on a beach with nothing but a pad of paper and a glass bottle to send messages to people by sea. But with my luck, my glass bottle would have a crack in it and my pen would stop working.
So anyway. Rebuilt the laptop last week – something started happening and we couldn’t get our data off so I thought to try upgrading to Vista and was able to get our data off. But turns out that our fancy digital camera isn’t compatible with Vista (meaning I can’t download pictures from it to the laptop) so either we go spend $1,000 on a new fancy digital camera to replace the one we have that is only five years old, or we go back to XP.
Waiving off Vista (and a new fancy digital camera) seemed the responsible way to go, so I put XP back on the computer. But now I can’t see our external hard drive from either of our computers. You know, the external hard drive that has 1.5 yrs worth of pictures on it? And two years of video? And who knows what kinds of documents and spreadsheets from the past bunch of years (including my master address list, going back to our wedding invites…). After checking with some nerdy friends, I learned that it will cost THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS to recover the data on the external hard drive. After a night of freaking out and panicking I realized that maybe all was not as lost as originally feared.
I have every single digital photo I’ve ever taken uploaded to Kodak’s website (all 11,170 of them, starting in September 2002) and can order an archive CD of them from $200. We have the original Mini DV tapes of all of the video we’ve taken (sure, we’ll have to re-download them and that will be a pian in the arse, but it’s cheaper than THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS). And the documents, etc? That’s the hard part. I don’t even know what is on there which means one of two things: 1) It isn’t very important if I don’t know what is there, or 2) What if there is something really important on there and I don’t worry about recovering it and in 20 years I’ll want to see/look at it again. I think #2 two is the least likely of the options so I’m leaning towards just returning the hard drive and having them send a new one (it is under warranty so we get a new one for free but of course they don’t cover the cost of recovering the data).
I am in the process of upgrading the laptop to Vista yet again and seeing if I can *maybe* get it to recognize the external drive, since that is the last configuration that I knew the external hooked up to. I can’t imagine that it crashed because the external couldn’t go back to using XP but maybe, just maybe, it is fickle like that. I’m willing to test my theory. So here I sit, nerding it up with two computers in front of me; blogging on the desktop, and praying that the external hard drive will be happy to be reconnected with Vista.
Please join me in thinking good thoughts for my poor data.
Have you considered the GeekSquad?