I should start this post by saying that I am huge lover of photography, I take photographs wherever I go. After my family, photography is my next biggest passion and since the dawn of the digital camera my photo collection has grown considerably. For this reason Hubby bought me an external hard-drive to store all of my images on and to keep them safe. I was ecstatic but as usual didn’t actually read the instructions fully on what to do with it. Hubby bought me 1TB which he was told would be enough memory to keep me going for a few years in photographs so then I was very surprised just a few months down the line when doing a back-up that I received a message stating “not enough memory”.
Each time I had backed up, instead of doing an incremental backup to just add on the new files I was doing a full backup so I had some files up to 20 times. The trouble was I couldn’t just onto the hard-drive and delete the previous backups because I had changed things and deleted files as I had gone along on my laptop to create space so I had no way of knowing exactly which files were in each backup. A couple of weeks ago I spent a whole weekend going through my hard-drive creating new folders and deleting duplicates as I came across them. Finally when I had finished I had managed to free up approximately 80% of the memory on my hard-drive and felt much better for it. I decided that I could also now delete all of the images from my laptop to make more space and speed it up a little.
On Friday last week I was writing my post “I love being a Mummy” and needed the images to add to it so I connected my hard-drive and began to search for images, all was going well until I opened the folder entitled Beanie Boy and stared in horror a blank folder. There should have been 18 months worth of photographs of my baby boy but there was nothing. In a blind panic I began to search through all the other folders in the directory in the hope that I had moved them into the wrong folder by mistake. NOTHING! It was at this point that I began to cry as I knew that I had not burned any of the photos to disk, I didn’t have any on memory sticks and I hadn’t really uploaded many to Facebook. The only images I had were the physical photographs around the house and the ones I had used on my blog. I rang Hubby and in between sobs managed to explain what I had done. He asked all the usual questions, are they in the recycle bin, have you put them in the wrong folder but each time it drew a blank, I couldn’t find my baby’s photographs from the first year of his life and I couldn’t see any way of getting them back. I posted messages on Twitter and Facebook saying how sick and I felt and I received lots of lovely messages of support from people with ideas on how I could possibly retrieve them. I walked away from my laptop for a while and just sat on the sofa feeling numb.
A short time later I picked up my laptop again and click on the back arrow in the hard-drive folder and it took me a couple of levels higher in the sub-directories. Then I spotted something, another folder with the name Beanie Boy on it. My heart did a little jump and I tried not to get too excited as I double clicked on the icon and there before me were thousands of pictures of my beautiful boy staring back at me. I had not deleted them afterall and so then I cried with relief.
Immediately I performed another backup and have now made copies of discs with my photographs on ‘just in case’. So please learn from my lesson, if you haven’t backed up in a while, DO IT NOW! If you haven’t made duplicate copies of discs or onto memory sticks DO IT NOW because believe me, you do not want to feel how I did for that short time on Friday!!!
I kind of know the feeling, i had photos of my mum and my dog, both of which are no longer with me, on a memory card, and i wanted to put them on my laptop and on my new mobile so they were easy to view whenever i wanted. When i went to do this, i couldnt find where i put the memory card. I searched everywhere in the whole house and was devastated. As a final last ditch of hope, i checked the vacuum cleaner, and by some miracle, it was in the cylinder amongst the dust. The relief was huge, and its taught me to have several back-ups just in case. Photos are hugely precious to me so i never want to lose them.
You were so lucky, I would never have given that any thought. So pleased for you, the fact that your Mum and dog are no longer with you would have made that loss even worse for you x
As I read this post I could imagine your pain and was so glad to hear that you found the photos! I’ve not backed up my photos and files for ages – thank you for the reminder x
That is exactly why i wanted to do this post, to remind others so that they wouldn’t feel how I did x
So glad you found them 🙂
If something like this happens again, you can search for a file or folder name and you can specify for the computer to search its own hard drive and any external hard drives that are attached to it… then you can enter a name such as ‘Beanie’ and it should bring up all references xx
Thank you, that’s a really helpful comment – I shall make sure that I save these instructions as I’m sure I will need them again at some point in the future 🙂