Heartbreaking

A few weeks ago, we brought our external hard drive down from the loft where the PC is located, into the living to plug straight into the laptop. It was working fine, then all of a sudden it started making a funny noise and no files or anything could be accessed from it. The drive contains holiday photos from the last four years (approx), all the family photos including ones of my nieces and nephews since they were born, my thousand or so Spurs pics saved, itunes music library which contained over 12,000 songs, and all other documents saved in Word, Excel etc.

John's brother Paul was over for the weekend a fortnight ago and has just found himself a new job. He said he would take it with him and have it examined in the lab there which he very kindly did and reported back that it was hopefully they would be able to retrieve the data from it. However, devastating news received today revealed there were complications and would cost £300 to fix the problem. John wasn't keen on spending that amount of money (blokes aren't as sentimental about photos as females) but I was tempted because I couldn't bear the thought of losing precious memories. I will just have to get over it.

Obviously a lot of stuff can be rebuilt and recompiled, in fact John has been working for two days now on the itunes library. I couldn't care less about the music, I want my photos back! Luckily, I always have a selection of photos printed and they are safe in albums, so all is not lost. A new external hard drive arrived by post this afternoon and is firmly rooted to the floor tucked away between the two armchairs. Apparently John read somewhere that if they are moved or bumped they are prone to breakage. Great knowing that now!

Anyway, a lesson learned from this mishap is that everything but everything will be saved to disc in future as I am not going to run the risk of losing more photos.