About two months ago I bought a 250 gig hard drive to use as a backup/storage unit. I bought a case for it, and moved all of my photos, movies, design work and TV shows onto it, tired of lugging around 23948322340 DVDs worth of data. I didn’t like the idea of DVDs as backups because they’re so easily lost and scratched.
This weekend I burned a couple of DVDs for friends and moved some movies onto it from my hard drive because they were taking up too much space. I had the drive under our coffee table, and while the drive was on, Clive knocked it over. I didn’t think anything of it, because it just fell onto its side on carpeted floor.
Then I realized that my computer was no longer recognizing it as a device, and thought that maybe it’d just gotten too hot (as the case I purchased doesn’t have a great fan, and it’d been on for a long time). I restarted it and it sang a little tune. The Song of Death, so it seems.
My hard drive no longer spins. It just sings its song letting me know that EVERYTHING I OWN, PICTURES FROM THE PAST SIX+ YEARS ARE GONE. EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM.
When I realized the truth, I locked myself in the bathroom, took a shower and bawled my eyes out.
Data recovery is an option, but it will cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Hundreds of dollars that I’d rather not spend. All for the stupid mistake of putting it in a place where it could be knocked over. Oh, and glory-be, Maxtor won’t do a FUCKING thing about it, even though it’s a defect in their STUPID FUCKING PRODUCT, and really has nothing to do with anything we did wrong.
Pictures are by far the most important material object in my entire life (always have been), and now I have nothing.
(I backed up my stuff on DVD lots of months ago, so I don’t think ALL is lost, but definitely everything from the past eight+ months.)
