Devastation

Colin rang me late yesterday afternoon to tell me he'd been called out (he is on call this week), but he had my hard drive back from the IT guy at work and they'd managed to recover it. Cue much happy dancing ...

However, when he got back late last night and put it back into my laptop, we discovered that the operating system was corrupt, and the drive is unreadable. So, he tried reading it via USB, but no luck there either.

I am totally and utterly gutted. I have held the belief for a whole week that everything will come good and I'll get my files back, but no. I just can't believe it. Fair enough, I've lost all my music - that's not a major tragedy really apart from the hassle of loading it all back on there. My writing - very upset about. I like to write, though I'm not very good at it, but I do find it very therapeutic. I had about a dozen very long stories on that drive that I had spent weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks writing and then rewriting. I had just got some of them at a point where I was happy with them. Then there are my layouts - yes, I know I'm anal and I don't *really* need to keep the psd files AND the jpg files of each layout, but I do in case I ever want to make any changes or anything at any time in the future. I had several unfinished layouts, now gone forever. Theoretically I should still have everything else, as these days the only layouts I get time to make are for CT assignments, so they should all be in online galleries somewhere - and I did back my layouts up about three weeks ago, so fingers crossed that every completed layout is somewhere either on my backup or on the web somewhere. I'm shaking my head in frustration though - every digi kit I've downloaded in the last I don't know how long is gone ... (I did a partial backup when I backed up my layouts, but it takes forever to back up over our network and it slowed my laptop down too much, so I didn't do it all) - so now I'm going to have spend time trying to work out what I've lost and seeing if I can get the links reset.

The worst thing, though - my photos. All my photos from our little break in Wales were on there, and they weren't backed up. There were about 150-200. I am totally distraught, as some of those pictures were among the best I'd taken in a long time, not least the fact that they are full of memories that are now lost.

Colin says he will send the drive off to a specialist recovery firm and he'll pay whatever it takes to get the files recovered, but I am convinced now that the files are unrecoverable. Aside from the fact that we don't have the money to do this, I can't get my hopes up again.

So, I'm totally and utterly devastated this morning. I have felt sick all night and didn't sleep well. The moral of the story is, back up your files EVERY DAY. That way, you won't ever be in this position.

Still, one of my strengths is that I bounce back quickly. I will always mourn the loss of my stuff, but I will get over it within a couple of days and try to move on. Glass half full, not half empty. While I type this post, the old hard drive from my laptop is plugged into this computer (we have many computers in this house) while I back it up again (it's already backed up on the EHD, but Colin insisted on having two backups). By the time I've finished backing it up, hopefully Colin will be home - he's out on site this morning but has to come back this way on his way back to the office, so he'll pop in and put it back in the laptop for me so that I can scrap today if I want to. In a minute I'm going for a shower, then I'm going to tidy the kitchen (which I cleaned yesterday but you'd never guess) and get some washing in, and then I think I might indulge my bad mood and do some baking. There's nothing like home baking for making you feel better, is there. I might even get the breadmaker out and do some bread too.

Okay, enough rambling, I need to get on with my day and try to recover some of my good humour. Harumph!