Have You Checked Your Hard Drive?

You may remember the famously spooky line, "Have you checked the children?" from "When A Stranger Calls," the 1979 thriller that scared the bejeebies out of millions of folks, especially me - and I only saw the preview (I was in 5th grade). A couple of days ago I had a similarly scary experience.

After returning from an amazing week in the Pacific Northwest I copied the four-plus gigabytes of photos we took to our external drive, then opened Picasa to look at them on the larger monitor. Not only were they not found, four months worth of photos were gone. If a CSI staffer was examining the drive they'd conclude the camera was broken, or the photographer had disappeared, on or about July 27^th, 2008, the date of the last photo. Oddly, all photos prior to the 27^th are fine, as was the entire iTunes library.

Gone were the photos of our saw-whet owl visitor, the Ring-necked Pheasants, the out-of-range/date Little Blue Heron, the lifer Curlew Sandpier, the rare-in-the-Basin Hudsonian Godwits, the ultra-rare Magnificant Frigatebird . . . but at least those (and others) are immortalized here on recent posts on The Feather and the Flower. Gone are hundreds of other pics: family outings, family at home, landscapes, macro shots of insects and plants, images for work, and who knows what I'm forgetting.

Obviously it could be a lot worse. I know too many folks that have lost their entire photo collection - years of images, gone - or all of their personal financial files. Too many that have lost data for their research projects, too many that have lost their Master's thesis or doctoral dissertations. I've never known anyone who lost The Great American Novel, but I'm sure that's happened, too.

Happily, I was able to recover all the photos. I'm in one of those, "Aww, lawdy, lawdy! I've been given a second chance!" modes, I'm sure I'll be one of those annoying types back from the brink. I'll be completely anal about backing up more often. Weekly, like I originally planned before I got lethargic about it. I'll be proselytizing the virtues to everyone I meet, at least for the next few weeks.

So, how about you? Have you checked your hard drive?

Regular posting to begin again tomorrow.

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