Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Hungry Hippo

My computer's been in a funk.
I should have seen this coming.
I naively kept plugging along,
thinking those strange kinks
in the system would magically fix
themelves.

Until one day when I sat down to find
ALL my photos from the YEAR
were GONE. Poof! Just like that.
Whisked away into cyberspace.

I cried.
And then I got mad.
And then I called David.
And then I cried again.
And then I got pissed off.
And then I cursed myself
for not having a backup
or printing enough photos
throughout the year.
And then I mourned the loss!
Oh, so many photos.
So many memories --
moments in time that can
not be recreated.
Images that I was really proud of.

It made me thankful for my blog.
There are a lot of good pictures on
there! But this experience also
helped me see that I really need to
get it printed at some point.
Bound in a book.
I'm going to work on that.

In the meantime, David got down to the
business of trying to recover my lost images.
It was a time consuming and frustrating
process for him, but he didn't give up!
He used two recovery software programs
and spent several frustrating hours on this.
With a combination of patience, technology and luck --
he was able to recover a good majority
of the pictures. I did lose quite a bit
but not all of them. Thank goodness.

A big chunk of what got eaten were the
pictures taken when Jen and Jack were
here. Out of around 430, we salvaged
45 or 50. Not all of those were great photos,
but at least we have something.
I felt terrible about that.
Of course, Jen was totally understanding.

Word to the Wise:
If a message pops up on your computer
saying "LOW DISK SPACE", pay attention
to it. I didn't. I didn't know what it meant.
So, I closed the message box and moved
along my merry way. What a dumb ass
I was! Turns out, I had used up all the
available memory on my hard drive.
So, it just started eating itself to make room.
Apparently when computers eat, they eat
like a hungry hippo. Now I know. . .

The solution:
a) Clean up your hardrive and delete
unnecessary things that have been saved
b) Buy an external hardrive and save all
your big files to it (pictures take up a lot of space).
It's so worth a hundred bucks.
c) It doesn't hurt to have a super fabulous,
computer literate and very cute husband
on hand just in case, too!

Next: The Trumans come to Arizona!

3 comments:

TruJen Phtography said...

Oh my god your so horrible! :o)
(Since you were beating yourself up I thought I'd join in!)
No, really, I feel bad that you lost so many pictures from the year.Like you said though, it's a lesson learned. I think it's a great idea to get your blog bounded! It'd be a nice coffee table book! Or you could put it away and when your famous and Vanity Fair wants to do a spread on you, just bring out the book and they'll learn about the Samara of yesterday! Cool plan huh?!

Lindsay Teague Moreno | 5ive Photo said...

ME:"I don't think it's your fault, because when you're running out of memory, you get a warning that says 'DISK SPACE LOW', so it has to be the computer".

YOU: "oh, it did say that, LIKE 6 MONTHS AGO. SHIT"

ME: GASP, "Oh, DAMN".

Kim Kwan said...

This SUCKS ASS!
Yes, external hard drive with a regular, religious backup!!! A MUST! (I also burn all my photos to DVDs and store them in my safe!)
Sorry you had to learn such a HARD lesson!