Let This Be a Lesson to You, or Don't Let This Happen to You! or Learn from My Mistake

Ugh, what a week! Well, let me start a few weeks ago. I get daily specials in my inbox from TigerDirect, for electronics sales/clearances, etc. I've bought a few things through them. They had those little thumb drives on sale for I think it was $2.99 for 1 gb ones. I bought 2 (the limit), because I have been lax in backing up. Since getting new cameras, they are much more space intensive than my old camera, and I used up my hard drive on this rickety old beast pretty quickly. So I bought an external hard drive last fall to store photos on, and its been working great! It worked so great, that I stored all my info. on it, photos, documents, spreadsheets, e-zines, etc. It takes simply FOREVER to backup to CD's, literally all day, so I haven't done it in awhile. Well, technically, since October of 2006, if you must know.

OK, so back on track .I ordered these little drives thinking they would be great for backing up, photos on one, documents on another, and easy to take right out of the machine to keep them safe, rather than climbing under the desk and unplugging stuff. Can you see where this is going?

So anyway, I'm waiting for these little drives to come, and waiting, and waiting. Then I sorta forgot about them. Two weeks later (last Friday) I had to go into the garage to look for something, I've long forgotten what. We rarely use the garage, hubby's truck is in there, but only gets taken out every few week sor so, and even then, we use the garage door to go in and out, not the side door deep in the bushes. I forgot to grab the garage door opener, so climbed through the bushes into the side door, and what do I find in there? Not one, but TWO packages left by UPS. Now, I have complained to them about this before, even directly to the driver, and it hasn't happened in months, so it never occurred to me to look out there. So my packages were sitting in the garage for close to two weeks, and I didn't know it. No note on the door, nothing.

That was late Friday. I grabbed my box, annoyed, and brought it in the house, and set it down on the dining room table. Saturday I spent the day cleaning the house, and never got around to opening the box. And as has been happening almost daily for about 2 weeks now, along came the daily evening thunderstorm. Yep, you guessed it. Power went out for a second, and came back on, and I kept hearing a "tick,tick,tick" noise, but I couldn't figure where it was coming from. I finally narrowed it down to the external drive, and couldn't find the drive from my computer, at all. I turned it off and on again, unplugged and replugged, and don't you know, the damn thing was plugged directly into the wall, NOT into the surge thing (not those cheapy ones, the big UPS/battery backup surge thingamajig). Monday I brought it to a local computer place. Nothing, nada. Can't get a single thing off it. They said I could try sending it to a place that specializes in data recovery. The cost, you ask? Oh, anywhere in the neighborhood of $500 to $2500 and up. Chump change!!! But, what cost do you put on SEVEN YEARS worth of photos? Every single photo of my son is digital from his birth until present. All family photos, animal photos, artistic type photos, photos of the renovations we did on the house, everything is gone.

And I'm blaming U.P.S. Its all their fault, of course. Its not my fault that I had the external drive plugged into the wall, or that I didn't shut the machine down when the storm came in. Its not my fault that I haven't backed up in 18 months. But it IS U.P.S.'s fault for leaving my package in the garage, because you know I would have backed up had I received my little drives.

So, no photos for awhile. I don't have enough room on my hard drive, and I don't have the cash right now to resurrect what I have and buy a new hard drive. I need to start putting hay up for the winter not to mention feeding them in the summer. And pay for the material we bought for the addition on my barn ... that is now held up due to zoning issues. That is quite a long story, that I won't go into now because nothing is resolved yet. But once it is resolved, I may have something to say about that. Not to mention paying up to $750 in the fees for the various departments to be told that we have zoning issues when you get to the very last department.

So its been a crappy week. But, 2-legged and 4-leggeds are healthy, so things really aren't all that bad anyway, are they?