My Personal Crash of 2010

No it's not the stock market - although we're still taking punches from that. But I feel it in my gut just the same. It's my hard drive.

I am a photo person. I love photographs. They ground me. But more than that, they tell me my story and at the risk of sounding completely self involved, I feel rather lost without photographs.

I bought my MacBook in 2007 to help me with a specific project. When my girls graduated from high school, my gift to them was something I spent a full year working on - with the help of their God-mother (the talented Taydn): an 80-page, 12"x12", hard-cover, perfect-bound self-published, personalized album of photos and narrative, chronicling each of their lives from family tree roots to their own graduations. I spent hours, days, weeks, scanning photos of each of them - as babies, as toddlers, through school, on vacations, during holidays, major events, with family, with friends, with pets, with life. I know they were appreciated but I loved them so much, I ordered one of each of them for myself as well.

The ability to organize and put the whole family story together got intoxicating. I was addicted and soon I was spending free time scanning and inputting only a fraction of what is literally thousands and thousands of photos. I have photos going back generations from my family, Bob's family and Anne's family - to say nothing of our own family. I purchased a scanner that could scan multiple images at a time and still, I could only make a dent in the archives I possess. The best part of digital technology was that anything new I could simply upload directly to my computer without having to bother with having anything "developed". In fact, my camera acts as a video camera as well and our trip in 2008 to Cancun was captured that way - (including me cliff diving!) I tried several times to create a back-up on CD (I did not purchase an external hard drive), but it was time consuming and more often than not would "fail due to disc error". In the end, I had over 11,000 photos and videos stored on my hard drive.

And then, on Monday, it crashed. And several attempts - including with a very expensive company that specializes in retrieving data from the the most messed up hard drives - proved futile. It was gone. All of it. Roughly 4,000 photos and movies were strictly digital transfers so they are lost forever. The guy at the Apple Store said I was the first person he ever knew of who couldn't get their data back. Lucky me.

I received a new hard drive from Apple at no cost but purchased an external drive this time. And I'm starting again. But I will do it better. I will take the time to organize them as I upload them.

And so I begin. Again. The 7,000 I have to re-enter and then on to the thousands in storage. I am "The Keeper of the Photos". I wonder if anyone cares outside of me?