Funk

Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the two small people bickering all day. Maybe it's the fear that our country is going to hell in a handbasket - or at least toward financial ruin -but whatever it is, I'm in a funk :(

I'm sure this has something to do with it - last spring the hard drive on my PC crashed. Knowing that this would cost several hundred dollars if not more to recover, we stuck it in a ziploc bag and sort of forgot about it for a while. Then the new year came, and thoughts of tax time brought it back into the forefront - our electronic returns are on there for the last two years and I really didn't want to have to start from scratch. Mind you, also on there were ALL of our pictures from 2008 (pretty much all of Jason's first year of life) and early 2009, which were not backed up anywhere. I had sort of put this out of my mind, thinking that surely they were recoverable. Forensic experts can recover things from fire and water damage, right? Surely this was just a mechanical problem that needed to be corrected and all the data was still there.

So, we not-so merrily shipped it off last month for recovery and paid the $200 they wanted in advance because it had been opened (don't EVER open them - automatic $200 charge!). After some analysis they called about 3 weeks ago with an estimate, and the discouraging news that it was 'unlikely' they would be able to recover anything. I think I cried for hours.

We told them to go ahead and try, because if they didn't get anything we wouldn't owe anything beyond the $200, and in the meantime I emailed my dad thanking him for always going on vacation with us and sharing his pictures - at least I had SOMETHING.

He emailed me back with something I had forgotten, he'd visited us for Jason's baptism, Father's day and Halloween that year and actually had CD's of OUR pictures - hallelujah! All was not lost. I think I had copies of the discs in my hand 3 days later, because my dad rocks and is just awesome like that. Anyway.

Yesterday afternoon I received this lovely note via email:

Greetings,

We have completed the diagnosis of your hard drive. Your drive was evaluated in our lab where we were unable to read any data from the drive surface. There was an internal mechanical alignment problem which partially contributed to a head crash destroying part of the storage media. This occurs when an actuator arm or read/write head comes into physical contact with the surface of the platter(s). The head digs into the platter(s) damaging itself and also removing small pieces of the media where the data is stored. As the platter spins, magnetic debris from the crashes are often scattered to other surfaces, which in turn causes more media damage (a magnetic snowball effect). Unfortunately due to the type and extent of this damage the data is unrecoverable.

(Sigh) The tears started rolling again. Because while I am so eternally grateful to have some of the pictures I'd thought were lost, I'm missing so much - all the early pictures from January to April 2008 when Jason was so very little; William's 5th birthday at home; Evie's 7th birthday party and home celebration; Jason's 1st birthday (this is the one that's REALLY killing me.)

I've spent today downloading the very few pictures I had posted to Facebook (thankfully, you only really share good ones) and I just looked back at the pictures from my blog and am so very thankful that there are some good ones there I can download too.

My next plan of attack is to get our videotape digital somehow and try to get screenshots. While we don't do a lot of video, one thing we've always done is the kids' birthdays. Wish me luck.

So that's a lot of words to say I'm in a funk. I really hope to get out of this soon because I'm not really getting much done - although I have crossed one thing off my list thanks to Matt keeping the kids out of my hair for a few hours on Tuesday - I'll share that in my next post! :)