Wrong. The computer was so unresponsive that I powered it down thinking it needed a total reboot, but when it restarted a broken folder with a question mark flashed and the more we read the quicker we realized that the hard drive was gone.
We've lost all of our photos: our wedding, Roscoe's entire childhood, the last three months since Merritt was born. Every digital photo that we've ever taken, they were all stored on my computer. Not to mention ALL of our music files, my work documents, and more.
How could we have overlooked such a simple step as backing up our files? It's absolutely crazy.
Our only hope is to send the hard drive to a data recovery specialist in order to have the files extracted. The cost ranges from 600 to several thousand dollars. Worth it, but still an unforeseen cost. And there are no guarantees.
Has anyone ever gone through this? Did you have a happy ending?
We went through this with our old computer. Luckily we didn't have much on there except for Itunes - no pics or important documents. Sorry to say that nothing was recovered, literally nothing. We were out about $300 and didn't get anything. My one tip is that if you have Itunes, you can call customer service and they might unlock all of your songs to download for free again. We were able to get back about 80% of the songs we had downloaded (just couldn't get the ones they no longer carried). Sorry to hear you've lost all the picture though, that would be so tough! Hoping you get some better news than we did!
ReplyDeleteOh my god...
ReplyDeletenot what I wanted to hear! What company did you use?
OH NO!! That's so awful. Fingers and toes crossed for you that they can retrieve your info. I'd be most upset about the photos. I'm not great about backing up my computer, but I'm a nut about my photos. After I upload them to my computer, I always go onto Kodak Gallery and save them on there too. And I print them every few months for albums so that I have hard copies as well. Do you have prints of your photos at least?
ReplyDeleteHey there. Did you authorize any other computers to use your iTunes? You should be able to sync your iPod with the other computer and get all your music -- if you synced your iPod with the other computer that is.
ReplyDeleteI SWEAR by these drives. I keep all of my photos on them:
http://www.macmall.com/p/LaCie-External-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~7702561~pdp.fbihhjj
I use this one as a portable drive if I'm traveling or something: http://www.macmall.com/p/G-Technology-External-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~8116265~pdp.gbedbjf
Here's a link to the baby shower photos I did. Did I send you a disk, email them or did you download them. I can't remember. Photo sharing is another option, but I'm sure you thought of that.
Good luck on getting things back!!!
I used Best Buy to retrieve my files, maybe not the best company (?) but that's where we bought our computer so we just went back. Best of luck :)
ReplyDeleteRaising Snowpeas: And they still charged you even though they didn't recover your stuff? That is terrible!!
ReplyDeleteEd: You are the best. I will look into those. I have your photos in my email :)
Will we ever see you and Adrian again?
My drive just crashed on my work computer...all 6+ years of my design work was GONE. I was pretty upset, but I can't imagine how I would have felt if it were personal files (photos). However, all my files were saved after we sent the drive in for file recovery. My drive was 'physically damaged', which is really bad and they still were able to retreive ALL my files. It cost $900 and we used Ontrack Data Recovery in Reston. There's hope!
ReplyDeleteJessa: That's one of the companies we were looking at, apple endorsed. It's great to hear that they retrieved everything for you. Oh! I hope that's me!!
ReplyDeleteMama Tully: I have some prints/albums, but there were probably 25000 photos, or more, on my computer, so most of them were just archived. :(